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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472325">and make your heart proud</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi'>wanderNavi</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i promised you no such thing as heaven [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blue Spirit - Freeform, Gen, I always talk way too much about food, POV Second Person, Spirit Shenanigans, Unreliable Narrator, on having names and losing them, when have I ever passed up a chance to talk about genocide too</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 09:15:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>47,195</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472325</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You exist along the narrow border of banished and dead. On the ship, as soon as you’re able to roll off the hard, lumpy mat nailed onto a shelf in the med bay without dying, the sailors yell for you by a name you have not heard before.</i>
</p><p>Or: Zuko prays at the wrong shrine, runs errands due to blackmail, clobbers someone with an expensive artifact, and gets manipulated into joining the Gaang early.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i promised you no such thing as heaven [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1924483</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>106</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>200</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from “I’ll Keep Coming” by Low Roar. Seasons and time is a little wobbly until canon tumbles in.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So you’re alone now. No you’re not, you’re only one of the many, the far more than you ever thought possible, splintered remains of lives and families smashed into driftwood by the war bleeding its guts across the land, dragging its entrails through the ash and dust. You’re one of the kids and teenagers rubbing your swollen feet, gingerly wrapping the cleanest scrap of cloth you have over the blisters embedded onto your soles by the bone shaking miles of walking away from the fire that burned you. You’re just one of the refugees hopelessly trying to keep ahead of the armies shredding the farmland countryside into ruins through thoughtless aggression the previous Fire Lords never had. At least, never had to this extent.</p><p>Negligence, a man spits, with the dried blood of his youngest child still caked across his left sleeve. You sit to the side, poking the edges of the scar tissue along your nose, as he frantically paces, waiting for the medics to come back out with relief in their exhausted eyes as they tell him the amputation is successful and his child won’t die like the others. The new bastards are all idiots, he growls, that new tyrant most of all. The whole world will starve if they keep destroying the land.</p><p>Head bowed, but watching his fists, you place your hands back on your knees, and shift your weight just a bit forward, more firmly on your aching feet. A nurse comes out with wet hands smelling of harsh soap. She says, the operation was successful, your child will live today, but –</p><p>You are not alone, but –</p><hr/><p>You exist along the narrow border of banished and dead. You hear the decree first and see it for yourself on paper when you drag yourself into town two ports down from where you are thrown away. The Fire Nation’s youngest prince is banished. You are the banished prince and the prince is not you.</p><p>On the ship, as soon as you’re able to roll off the hard, lumpy mat nailed onto a shelf in the med bay without dying, the sailors yell for you by a name you have not heard before. Waves crash into the side of the ship and you stumble as you carry sodden cloth in baskets big enough to fit yourself. The cooks all talk too loudly and too quickly as you struggle through washing tin dishes and cups during a mealtime rush, three more dishes dropping into the filthy soap suds for every bowl you stack on the drying racks.</p><p>The crew barks at you with the name that is not yours, that has no mothers or fathers or sisters or thrones. The first two days, you respond in delayed fits and starts to the unfamiliar sound. The next two days, you respond slowly in resistance, trying to tell them in your higher voice which their salt and smoke scraped throats roll right over that your name is not a hollow, dead shell with no home or ancestors, abandoned by the road, but instead -</p><p>The next two days, you respond to the name as if it is your own. And all the days after that, until the crew dumps you on orders at the edge of town with away as the only direction forward.</p><p>You still can’t entirely comprehend the word <em>banished</em> and what it means for you, so you stick towards towns with familiar red flags waving in city centers and by flowing water. Hunger leads you on a leash towards a small store on the edges of market proper where you can see soft apricot peaches through the open doorway and smell fresh cooked <em>bing</em> filled with brown sugar and red bean paste. You have no money, but you have your name, and you go into the tiny building to see what you can get.</p><p>The only occupant in the room, a girl a few years older than you, glances over at your entrance from the lychee nuts she’s stacking. Her eyes widen and she glances back and forth between your face and something by the door. Turning to see what it is, you see a flier pinned among many others that you’ve never seen before. A flier with a burned face and the words, “By decree of the Fire Lord” and “Banished” and “Prince Zuko.”</p><p>Oh. That’s supposed to be your face. That’s supposed to be your new face.</p><p>You turn back to the girl in equal alarm. She drops the lychee into a tumbling pile and yanks you through strips of cloth into a musty backroom filled with wooden crates and burlap bags of rice and flour. She’s taller than you and saying things like, “Are you crazy? What are you doing here, you can’t stay in town and let anyone see you. Oma’s tits, you’re a child.”</p><p>“Um,” you eloquently say.</p><p>She squints at you in the candle flame and what little light makes it past the cloth door. “You’re a mess,” she says with complete irreverence fit for her pale, more green than amber eyes.</p><p>That smacks you back to attention and you draw up in anger and say, “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m Prince Zuko, son of –”</p><p>“For the love of Agni,” she interrupts and <em>slaps her hand over your mouth</em>.</p><p>Incised, you bat her hand away from your face as she hisses, “You can<em>not</em> do that. You’re a kid, your name <em>will</em> kill you, either from the Fire or Earth army.”</p><p>You glower at her, even if that lights up the left side of your face with pain. “It’s my <em>name</em>.”</p><p>“It’s the name of a soon to be corpse,” she says and no wonder she’s stuck here on the edge of town among muddy streets with cracked and dented tiny buildings and no customers if she has an attitude like this. You should never have set foot into this shack, even if she frustratingly has a point you don’t want to ever acknowledge.</p><p>“Use a name that’s more generic. Like mine, I’m Rin, there are a million Rin’s. There’s five other Rin’s in this very neighborhood,” she says.</p><p>“I’m not using <em>Rin</em>.”</p><p>Rin shrugs. “Then what about Yi? Is that good enough for you?”</p><p>You growl but don’t say no. It’s better than what the sailors called you.</p><p>“Alright Yi, get out of here.”</p><p>“Can I have some food?”</p><p>“Do you have money to pay for food?”</p><p>“No,” you admit, with the annoyance of this whole encounter curdling in your throat.</p><p>“Then get out of here, before the guards arrive and throw you into a prison. Where there is no food either.”</p><hr/><p>“Name?” the clerk drawls without even glancing up from the stained paper before him.</p><p>You panic, tripping over the Yi Rin shoved into your hands and say Lee instead. The clerk pens in the wrong character, but before you can correct his mistake, he’s already moved on with a bored “Next?” The person behind you shoves at your shoulders when you don’t move out of the way fast enough. Great, you’re Lee now, and not even with the symbolism you wanted to mean.</p><p>You’re so hungry, you can barely think of anything else. All your festering indignation has corroded into rusty dust and it’s everything you can do to unsuccessfully forage and fish for what you can eat that won’t waylay you with cramping indigestion for a day or come back out the wrong end.</p><p>With nothing to barter with and no coin, you can’t afford anything legally and you refuse to beg. You cannot use your name, so you swallow it instead so that the knowledge that you are Zuko, you are the son of Fire Lord Ozai and Lady Ursa, feeds you instead because you refuse to beg and you refuse to starve to death.</p><p>Which leads you here, in line with dozens of others, toiling for hours carrying heavy packages into a warehouse, and getting cheated out of your wages. Your weakened arms and legs shake each night from the work, your back painful with knots, but you’re able to sip a thin broth each day when you wake up and when you go to sleep and you stay alive long enough for the battlefield to reach the edge of town, forcing you into the wilderness again.</p><hr/><p>You must live, so you must eat. You must eat, so you must work. You must work, so you must find a job.</p><p>You can’t find a job.</p><p>You sit on roofs, pressing your palms onto hot clay, feeling the curves of the shingles and their half-worn off glaze pressing into your calves. People mill through the market below you. Their attention plods along from stall to stall, addressing faces, watching coins, embracing hands. Not even the children look up. The northeastern vacant fields are better for cloud gazing than the cloth strewn corridors of the markets. As long as you bring a plum or a fresh blossom for the tiny shrine at the base of the lone tree among the field’s grass and thorny flowers, the earthen stage beneath the oppressively wide sky invites all to linger.</p><p>The hat on your head and your short unwashed hair itches. You sit on roofs, basking in the unfiltered sunlight laying its reassuring palms upon the back of your hands and your neck, watching the people below you. You watch, trying to carve a hollow from the hunger lodged hard in your stomach and your throat just large enough to slot in the motions you must repeat and perfect so that you in your muddy clothing and oil-clumped hair and smooth fingers can blend in and get a job and <em>eat</em>.</p><p>You always were clumsy and too slow to learn your katas and the movements of your sets. These lessons and instructions are no different, for all your heightened desperation to stop making mistakes, to stop failing.</p><p>A breeze brushes its fingertips along the branches and leaves of the trees lining the street and peaking from their courtyards like teenage gossips chattering over their walls. There must be water nearby, where you can wash yourself.</p><p>You must work so you many eat. You must eat so you may live. You must live so you may return.</p><p>Home.</p><p>You think.</p><p>“Banished for life,” sneers the memory of the poster lurking at the very back of your mind. “No redemptions.”</p><p>You turn fourteen in a town you do not know the name of.</p><hr/><p>The shrine rises abruptly among the scraggly trees growing prickly and shrub-like against the hot wind blowing from the great Si Wong Desert. You’ve been heading south, away from the northern hemisphere almost completely controlled by the Fire Nation and where winter hunkers down with a deep vengeance. The charcoal of large fires thins out as you travel, away as fast as you can on your own two feet or hitching on rides. You need every scrap of luck and good fortune the spirits dignify to give you, crumbs for the poodle monkey under the table, so you always offer what you can when you encounter a shrine. Especially those falling into disrepair, forgotten in the churning mud of the war.</p><p>You dig through the bag you stole a month ago and pull out your last apple and the thin knife you didn’t steal. After cutting the fruit with the dulling blade, you set the pieces in the cracked bowl at the base of the illegible words painted on the weather damaged statue, the offering made all the stronger by your permanent hunger. Sucking on the thin layer of juice on your fingers, you step back, taking in the sagging roof, the smell of dry disrepair, and the hole in one wall with a frown.</p><p>There’s no telling who this shrine is supposed to be dedicated to. So you bow your heads and send out an open prayer to deities and the spirits and the guides of your mother and uncle’s tales, for the blessings of safe travels as you flee south and east, that you may find food and shakily rebuild your bending in the secrets of dawn. Then you sling your bag back onto your back, double check the wrappings on your arms and calves, and walk away, thinking little more of the shrine.</p><hr/><p>“You’re one of those Fire Nation scum colony street rat brats, aren’t you?” the man in front of you sneers. The smell of smoke clings to his patched-up clothing and his yellow teeth. You silently narrow your eyes at him as the foot traffic in the street automatically opens a bubble around you two that everyone ignores exists. He chews on a wad of something putrid and says, “Answer me <em>boy</em>. You have arsonists for parents, I can see it in your piss eyes.”</p><p>Frequently, the Earth Kingdom frankly disgusts you. “That’s not how it works,” you start to say.</p><p>He spits the leaves he’s chewing onto your shirt. Your jaw snaps shut with a crack and your hands itch towards the swords you skipped meals and haggled for literal hours over sheathed at your back.</p><p>“Fuck off,” you sling at him, and step to the side, disengaging. He steps back into your path. The crowd around you shifts, from one cautious color to a more nervous, a more anticipatory one. Eyes hook claws onto your rags.</p><p>You breath in heavy through your nose and breath out harsh the same. Banished or not, you are Zuko, you are the son of Ozai and Ursa, you are of Agni’s line and you are nobility. You bite down hard on the obsidian core of you – your swallowed name and your tattered honor.</p><p>Scowling at his Earth Kingdom bulk, you hiss, “I said, get out of my way.”</p><p>“No,” he says and launches pillars of rock into your gut with a slide of his foot.</p><p>Fortunately for your pissed off, hungry body, especially your aching arms, the opium his smokes and the leaves he chews have long ransacked his strength. He petulantly fights, sweating and shaking, against your blades. The clearing in the crowd widens and wavers as you push him towards a wall and <em>out of your way</em>.</p><p>You close in on him, the way you figured out how to strike back at the fifth Earth Kingdom asshole taking issue to your existence and the colors of your birth. The forms taught to you by the palace tutors live in your head, but fighting stances taught to royal princes aren’t enough on their own for months of dirty fighting and back alley brawls.</p><p>The man goes down with a punch to his neck. Not enough to even knock him unconscious, but enough to shock and wind him.</p><p>Breath cycling through your lungs in deeper bursts, you glare at your opponent slumped upon the ground and against a dark stone wall. With disgust, you brush off what you can of his spit, then transfer your glower at the whispering townspeople.</p><p>“Show’s over,” you yell at them.</p><p>They part before you as you stalk away, now angrily searching for somewhere you can do laundry earlier than you anticipated. Asking around tugs you into five different directions until someone finally points you towards a small stream more rock than water.</p><p>You follow the sound of mallets beating on cloth upon flat stone, then veer slightly off, eschewing company. Among your worldly possessions, you only have about one and a half outfits; you’re loath to setting your half-naked, distracted self among so many strangers, especially after you just fought one of their neighbors.</p><p>The water flows cold over your hands entangled in the cloth of your shirt. Still not entirely sure how to go about laundering, operating solely on the few glimpses you caught on the ship and at other creeks like this one, you scrub at the dirt and the stains. You’re far enough upstream from the town’s women that you cautiously heat the water around your hands rubbing against each other. Eventually, the soap’s foaming comes up as a clean white.</p><p>You pull the shirt out of the water, wring what you can, and flap it in the air a few times to get <em>some</em> of the wrinkles out. Since the sun’s making its way into afternoon and you want some more distance between the town and where you make camp, you slip the wet garment on and raise your ambient temperature to dry it while you carry your bags in your hands and conclusively leave town.</p><hr/><p>At first, you’d been desperate to use you flame, then you quickly became sorry for ever wishing so. Your apprehension lasts all of three days when you miscalculate your depth of vision, your balance, and your feet’s silence and then it’s light fires and claw yourself into an escape or die upon the blades of a dozen guards from breaking into the estate of a landowner with far more clout than you realized.</p><p>After that unmitigated disaster, you begin training every morning as if you still have instructors correcting your constant mistakes and showing you new forms.</p><p>In short, your bending’s a mess and you can’t even use it often, being in enemy territory. Somewhere along the way, perched on one of the great coins strewn embedded in the dirt on old battlefields, you consider being … a bit more spontaneous with your bending. Try anything new and unexpected that can give you an advantage. This thought carries you from one penniless town to another.</p><p>The towns rise like broken bones piercing through skin: painful and ghastly and beyond your capabilities to fix or address. They’re pieced together from broken scaffolding and half-built homes, empty except for the dust within them and the dirt upon the skin of the washed-out survivors. From hard eyes and tense shoulders, hands gripping improvised weapons and the thought always, <em>where’s my money, where’s my food, where’s my family</em>.</p><p>In the first month of your unmooring, you thought in twists of frustration and confusion about why these people continue fighting, why they continue refusing the glories of your nation’s technology and progress and advances. The resources your tutors tell you in their broad strokes, of food and wood and metal, the foundations of your glory.</p><p>In your second month, you cross paths with an army you smell – unwashed bodies and blood –  long before you see and the trail it drags behind it: burned fields, broken organs, the salt of tears smeared into every wound in the people’s hearts, doomed to stutter around deep scars. The words of your tutors quiet under the roar of exhaustion and hunger.</p><hr/><p>The hand before you – you think it’s a hand, there are long thin jointed things like fingers gathered together at one end like a palm, attached to a thin arm disappearing into a gray sleeve – holds out slices of an apple.</p><p>“Thank you for the offering,” the mouth on the being with the hand holding the apple slices says.</p><p>You glance from the fruit to the face. Three of its eyes blink. The fingers close over its cargo and slide back into the sleeve. You lick your lips, trying to work past the sticky cotton mouthed feel coating the roof of your mouth and your tongue. “You’re … welcome.”</p><p>The being – the spirit? – smooths its other hand over the lacquer wood, low table between you. A silent wind you cannot feel against your skin ruffles blades of almost purple grass and the sky glows the thick orange of a sunset after a storm. The spirit says, “I have not received an offering in many years, abandoned and forgotten. A debt repaid; we offer an exchange.”</p><p>A pure white porcelain plate molded into a long oval appears on the table, bearing a fresh, just caught fish longer than your arm. You haven’t seen a dish so delicately garnished and seasoned with a clear golden sauce drizzled over the pale fish skin since the last grand New Year’s banquet at the palace, over a year ago.</p><p>The spirit serves you, as you watch, hungry and enraptured. Fish flesh parts into white pieces under the stiletto thin flash of the knife shimmering like the skin and scales scraped into a pile on the side. Spindly fingers press ornate chopsticks into your hand, guiding you out of your stupor towards your serving.</p><p>“Thank you,” you mumble, and lift your first piece towards your mouth. The fish practically seems to melt over your tongue in flickers and waves of flavor from something citrus, star anise, peppers, and white vinegar. Tears almost well in your eyes as the longing for home and its soba noodles and its moon peach tarts and its seared urchin squid slams into you with all the force of an earthbender’s battering ram. You say again, “Thank you.”</p><p>The spirit watches you silently.</p><p>The golden light shifts towards green as you eat more of the fish, setting thin rib bones to the side as you move down the body towards the tail. The click of your chopsticks against each other or the porcelain bounce loudly into the silence pressing down upon your ears. You only eat a little bit of the fish, the rich flavors quickly overwhelming after months of subsiding on dried, tough meat and pilfered or scavenged fruits and nuts, helped along occasionally by broth more water than anything else and days old rice.</p><p>Was that teapot there before? It lifts in the being’s grip, filling two teacups almost to the top in a way that has you nervous about reaching out with your limited eyesight and tapping your fingers against the warped borders of your depth of vision without spilling a single drop of the fragrant drink. “May we remind myself,” the spirit asks, “of who you are?”</p><p>You manage to pick up the cup, hot porcelain against your fingertips, and tell them, “I’ve been going by Lee, but I’m Zuko. Prince Zuko.”</p><p>The syllables rest unfamiliar and flat on your tongue, like a river pebble you could skip across a pond. A row of eyes blink at you.</p><p>“Prince Zuko?” the spirit says. “You are not Prince Zuko.”</p><p>Your head snaps up from watching the ripples in your cup to the shifting bones of their face, and incredulous, you say, “What?”</p><p>The leftward voice of the spirit says, “You are not Prince Zuko, son of Fire Lord Ozai and Lady Ursa, heir to the Dragon Throne. You are You. You have been You and you will be You.”</p><p>You frown harder, the cup between your hands cooling and leaching your heat. You tell the spirit, “No, I am –” You choke on a stone lodged in your throat.</p><p>Coughing, you try again, “I <em>am</em> –”</p><p>You gasp for breath, hands at your throat, coughing and coughing around the block, eyes widening, warm liquid spilling over your fingers and onto the light-sucking matte of the table surface and onto your lap as the drink spills from the dropped cup. You wheeze, “I’m, <em>I’m, I am</em> –”</p><p>“You are You,” the spirit repeats. Light glistens off the sauce poured over the half-eaten fish flesh. You cough and cough, hunching over, gagging around the thin bones in your throat, the blockage in your windpipe suffocating your voice, your <em>name</em>. “And you are <em>only</em> You.”</p><p>You look up, horrified. The fish in the plate begins to breath with half its gills. Its eyes twitch and its exposed spine shudders. The sauce slowly turns red with blood. The spirit’s needle thin green fingers reach out from the billows of its sleeves to pick up the stiletto knife once more, cutting pieces from the writhing heart with swift slices that click against the porcelain plate.</p><p>With the voice of five, the spirit says, “You have eaten from our plate. You have eaten from our flesh. Just as you have eaten parts of our one, you have become parts of our one. While you are parts of our one, you cannot have any human given name.”</p><p>Oh no. What have you <em>done</em>?</p><p>“Did you take my name, where is it, <em>give it back</em>.”</p><p>“We are not You. You have given your name. Have You not offered and prayed for the exchange, for safety and food and your flame? We cannot simply give a name back.”</p><p>“Then I want a different exchange,” you demand with a desperation unbefitting of Prince –</p><p>Your thoughts screech into screaming noise and you crumple with wet hands gripping the mass of pain that is your head. You grit your teeth, shutting your eyes from the pieces of beating heart on the gory mess before you, and say, “We struck no bargain. I demand a different exchange.”</p><p>The spirit sighs, a gust of hot sand lacerating your fingers. “Deal making?” it says with the volcanic pressure of an oncoming eruption. “Very well, a debt to us from You. We will give you work so you may pay. That is your only deal.”</p><p>“I work for you, and you’ll give my name back?” you say with equal anger over this trick, this trap you flung yourself headfirst into.</p><p>“Your work for your name,” it agrees with bristling hair and fur.</p><p>“A loan,” it says and a mask of wood lands in your lap, leering up at you. “A name from spirits.”</p><p>A debt too.</p><p>The spirit rises with three of its hands clawing at the air and its joints and its joints and its joints snapping and popping as it straightens above you, a looming shadow of sea green and dried blood brown, of purple bruises and black abyss. It howls, “<em>NOW BEGONE.</em>”</p><hr/><p>You choke as you awaken, gasping for breath and gaging on the taste of something putrid and dead between your teeth. You roll onto your side in the lifting darkness of dawn approaching. Something clatters to the ground due to your movement.</p><p>Frozen and fearful, you set your hands upon the dirt and open your eyes, groping in the dim for what fell. You find it by your hip, something wooden, something with smooth ridges and curves, something very much like –</p><p>You sit up, clutching the mask in black and blue and white. Ribbon unspools onto your knees, a strong sturdy black cotton that won’t fray easily. Staring into its eyes, you sit paralyzed, unable to get up, unable to do your morning exercise or your meditation, pin down by a wooden stake carved with all your mistakes driven through your chest.</p><p>“A debt,” says the memory of the spirit from what decidedly wasn’t only a dream.</p><p>A debt, you now bear a debt, to regain – “No,” you say, voice rough and scraping along the raw walls of your throat.</p><p>“No, no, no, this can’t be – I can’t have – this –”</p><p>You were just <em>dreaming</em>, it was a dream, how could you control the contents of a dream twisting out from your grasp into its own solo dance. You spring up in a desperate scramble, shoving the damning mask deep into your bag and scooping everything up, onto your back and strapped to your side. <em>No</em>, drills into your head as effectively as the woodpecker chasing its meal. <em>No</em>, echoes in your mind as effectively as the army bugle you run from.</p><p>Dawn rises as you crash through the forest, just to be <em>away</em> from that awful visit, as if distance will change the mistakes you made: the apple, the shrine, the war room. You burst out of the trees upon a wide river and stumble to a halt, chest heaving and with absolutely no control over your breath.</p><p>The flames of Agni blind your eyes, reflecting off the wind-rippled surface of the river. Your feet sink into the soft grass on the wet riverbank. The eyes of silent birds and deer press against the palms of your hand, the flesh on the underside of your arms, the scars on your chest, the tan on your back.</p><p>“My name is –” you croak. The mice and fish watch your locked knees, the tension in your neck, the squinting of your eyes. You try again louder, sucking in gasps of the waking world, not the dream, what couldn’t be the spirit world, it couldn’t. “<em>My name is –</em>”</p><p>You fall to your knees and choke on your tears.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>“We have a job for you! A job for You!” the messenger says, grinning with at least seven canine teeth.</i>
</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Do you know how hard it is to find good atla fic that isn’t Zuko centric? And yet here I am contributing to the problem.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You stand outside a tent, your hands upon your swords, your back towards the heavy cloth. Inside, tables bear green and pale white treasures upon velvet the color of cream, held aloft in intricately carved trays the way palace servants in shawls and kimonos demurely presented porcelain bowls and gold-gilded fans and silken cloth to your mother. Behind another heavy cloth and past another silent and armed guard, boxes rubbed with sharp-smelling resins hold behind their clenched shut locks ruyi in clouded sighs of light purple, carved deep lavender spirits frozen with flutes lifted to their lips, and plates in white so pale its translucent.</p><p>In the largest box, something you only saw once in a glimpse that had the merchant watching you warily for over the course of the next three days: A dragon writhing through thick clouds and between flowering branches in loose coils. Its claws grip smooth curves and it turns its scowling head out, mouth open in a roar, so that the tea within the almost priceless jade pot can pour out its throat. Every scale along its neck catches the light along thin edges. No dragons adorn the accompanying set of teacups where instead less extinct wildlife frolic and prance among blossoms and wisps and branches.</p><p>No one in this town, or the next, or the one after that can remotely afford that tea set. No one except royalty could afford that tea set and you don’t ask how the merchant got his hands on it in the first place.</p><p>At what passes for dinner, late after the market finally closes and you’re practically nodding off into your bowl of rice, the other guard sets aside her empty bowl and asks, “What do you know about jade carving?”</p><p>Of the act itself, basically nothing.</p><p>She explains, “When carving jade, you must never use earthbending to change the stone’s shape or colors. The best artists can use earthbending to understand more of the fractures, stresses, and impurities within, but they will <em>never</em> bend what nature has given into something else.”</p><p>“Why not?” you ask around a bite of the too wet rice.</p><p>“It would break the harmony between nature and human along with corrupt the spirituality of what you make, especially pendants. Nature provides the raw materials that make our blood and bones. It would be an affront to try correcting what nature and the spirits give,” she answers, then stands up, bowl back in hand to wash it off and put it away. “All these war dogs have forgotten what it means for nature.”</p><p>You scoop out the last of the rice and follow her. “Is earthbending forbidden from other gemstones?”</p><p>“Yes. So now you understand more of our employer’s business and the deep stubbornness these artists operate on. You should learn from them. Every job should have a valuable lesson to learn from,” she says, then, “Do you want to spar again tomorrow? We’ll be packing up soon since business’s so slow here.”</p><p>You eagerly leap upon the offer.</p><p>The pay and meals that come from guarding and escorting merchants can be dubious at best, as every trader inevitably skips over you with your scar and the scrawniness of puberty slamming into you with not nearly enough food to brace yourself. The number of people willing to hire someone without a name beyond You are even less.</p><p>But they’re an invaluable source of news from the front lines, of who pushed which division away from what territory and what roads and trade routes are now dangerous. Merchants are incurable gossips with at least a quarter of their minds obsessively tracking the fortunes and failures of each other and who is likely to cheat you out of fair prices for genuine goods. You see more of the Earth Kingdom bouncing from employer to employer within the last two months than you had wandering alone for the previous four.</p><p>You also fight an incredible amount of bandits and hired thugs thanks to this line of work, more so than you thought possible before. Between the thieves and the other guards, you have more practice than ever in using your swords and your cold hand-to-hand. Merchants also make entering the great cities much easier than if you’d been alone and you always spend a week or two dashing through alleys and clambering up walls and being a general menace to the local police or guards receiving complaints about odd shadows.</p><hr/><p>As you travel northeast, you pass through alternating fields and hills. While you watch deer sprint away, your heart clutching its corroding memory of your cousin’s face asks, <em>Did Lu Ten see those mountains upon that horizon?</em></p><p>Did Lu Ten run his hands upon these trees? Did Lu Ten hear from the edge of the army’s camp the gongs and bells of these towns at every draining of the great hourglass in their market square centers? Did Lu Ten taste the tart flesh of these fruit as spring bloomed?</p><p>After a day’s hiking, you reach the crest of a hill that almost counts as a mountain and see, rising in the distance with the menace of a rushing tsunami, the hazy great white walls of Ba Sing Se.</p><p>Lu Ten told you once, on his first break back from his officer training, of the elements and their defenses. The Earth Kingdom carves out valleys and rings itself with mountains. The Water Tribes entrap their enemies in the frigid hold of ice rising as walls around their cities. The Air Nomads cloaked themselves in winds and the suffocation of a vacuum.</p><p>And what does the Fire Nation have, you asked, hands gripping a cake filled with lotus seeds folded into a sesame seed paste.</p><p>He smiled for you and said, Our blessings, our cunning, and our might. The Fire Nation does not retreat, so the Fire Nation does not need defenses for our cities. Who could attack the home islands?</p><p>Your breath shudders in your dry mouth, until you swallow, bow your head, and turn around, walking away.</p><hr/><p>When the trees rise up around you and you sit by a river, flimsy fishing pole in hand, you do not dwell on the triptych of your treasons. First, for questioning your father, for disrespecting him before all his great army advisors, for daring to suggest that the voice of the flame and Agni could be so incorrect, could even be <em>failing</em> his duties. Second, if you had stood up, if you had called even the tiniest ember to your hands and feet with the intent of harm towards your father, you, a filial son, breaking your duty – without even getting into the grounds for death when said father is the Fire Lord. Third, for not fighting when the Fire Lord commands and the disrespect of insubordination, for not finding a way to twist yourself out of the trap encaging you.</p><p>Something bites on your line and you reel it in, another fish for your meager pile which you kill with a knife severing its head from its still thrashing body. The spark rocks you begrudgingly bought sit in the pockets you sewed on with crooked lines and uneven stitches. They remain there while you gut your catches and dig a hole to bury the entrails and the scraped off scales, while you sharpen thin sticks and rub salt into the slick skin and flesh and roast your meal over a fire. You eat quickly, before a platypus bear comes investigating the smell.</p><p>Some days, the bruises on your knuckles convince you that you deserve this piteous new life for your treasons. Some days, the rain drenching your lungs convinces you that you don’t, that something had gone wrong. That somewhere in your past, a misstep among your many unlucky missteps took you upon the wrong path.</p><p>Some days, the ash from another long burned out village convinces you that you didn’t arrive at this destination on your own, that someone or the whole world pushed you off solid ground into the ravine.</p><hr/><p>The mask, to your displeasure, fits your face perfectly. You tie it on during one of your morning training sessions because no one stops you from doing so and you might as well learn how to fight and move with it on. The eye slits further limit your already reduced vision, so you take to the trees on a silent chase until you’re able to place the location of every bird and possum and fox with your hearing alone.</p><p>Then you go hunt a bear with the mask on.</p><p>A virtue of all the odd jobs you’ve been taking these last several months of your new life: you’re no longer the boy a sailor yelled at for not knowing how to properly hold a broom. You know how to build a stone wall by hand, how to hunt and passably shoot, how to bargain and filter rumors, how to nail someone on the head with a mahogany jewelry box, and how to butcher an animal and stretch every part into feeding thirty people.</p><p>Lotus leaves you gathered earlier for exactly this reason get wrapped and tied around the parts of the meat. You scrape the tissue and fat from the pelt as best you can into a bamboo tin, preparing the fur passably enough for someone more professional to finish, and roll the skin like a carpet. The last of your bandages go towards wrapping your washed and treated wounds, but the coin you’ll get from selling these goods, especially the liver and heart, will go towards buying more supplies. Maybe you’ll finally be able to replace the worn-out whetstone that was already on its last legs when you acquired it.</p><p>The shadows under the forest’s red leaves gain an orange tint in the bright sunlight, dimpled across the path you walk. The latitude here isn’t low enough for the depths of winter’s touch, but accustomed as you are to the caldera’s year-round heat, you send flickers of flame along your arms to chase off the evening’s slight chill. You’ve never had better control over fire as now, when the twin pressures of the memory of searing flame and the sure promise of death if anyone notices evidence from your shaky morning practice weigh you down.</p><p>Early the next morning, the town of Shaji nervously welcomes you. In the market center, a low tremor thrums. You wade through the whispers and tensions towards the meat market – easier to find than a tanner – with your ears open to the sideways glances and the whispers.</p><p>A woman approaching forty accepts your parcels, unwrapping your leaves and weighing your catch. She points towards one of your rougher cuts and warns, “Be more careful next time. I won’t be able to sell this piece for as much, it’s much too rough at the joints.”</p><p>“I’ll bear that in mind,” you say and mentally deduct a few coins from your expectations.</p><p>“Luo,” she calls into the bustle of people setting up for the day’s first customers. “Come help me process this platypus bear.”</p><p>Someone who is either her nephew or son emerges from a few rows down. He trots over, taking in the fur slung across your shoulders. Together, they rewrap the meat and sellable organs in plain cloth that will keep out the meltwater from the ice they pack around each parcel. Though she remains wholly focused on her work and counting out your haggled money, he keeps flicking uncertain glances towards your face. You maintain your straight spine and stiffly fail to ignore him.</p><p>“Where’s the tanner?” you ask once you’re relieved of most of your burden.</p><p>The woman points through the steadily filling crowd towards the north side of the square, saying, “Go out that exit, then turn right and at the next street turn left. There will be a shop on your right.”</p><p>The man watches you in suspicious silence.</p><p>You and your bear pelt push your way through the crowd along the directions that prove true. The tanner makes a noise of surprise at the leaves you line the skin with, but he doesn’t have to deal with washing out the dirty residue on the fur anymore, so he quickly quiets. Copper coins pass from his hands to yours and you make your leave, straight into the path of a clump of Fire Nation soldiers.</p><p><em>Oh no</em>.</p><p>Before they have a chance to realize there’s any reason to pay attention to you among the many villagers tensely beginning their day, you wrench yourself against a wall and haul yourself onto the roofs as fast as you can. Adrenalin floods your veins as you press yourself flat against the shingles and throw every prayer of thanks you can think of to Agni that you managed to sell all your bear parts already, freeing you from their bulk and weight. You pray some more that his favor will hold, and you will manage to escape this situation alive.</p><p>The soldiers move on, turning a corner further down the street: a patrol route on a newly captured town. You hadn’t accounted enough for the slow movement of rumors and now you are paying for your mistaken calculations of the frontline’s slithering travel.</p><p>Slowly, silently, you reach your hand towards the mask strapped upon your hip. It fits, as always, perfectly. Then you stand and sprint upon clay and wooden roofs, until you find an awning towards the edge of town you can safely stash your bag, until you gather a better picture of the red infection pushing its way into the town, the trails towards the forests where the main bulk of the army makes temporary camp, and the many blind spots in the main building commandeered for command.</p><p>When a window of opportunity opens, you sneak into the large building’s halls, tracking down all the scrolls on marching orders you can. Relaxed by the low threat level of a small town of mostly woodcutters and trappers, no one interrupts you for long enough to riffle through the newest maps and correspondence. Most importantly, you unearth the directives laying out the inventory of the supply lines and planed path through the forests.</p><p>As night falls the next day, you raid the couriers, taking just enough to be back on your way towards the east, as clearly creeping back west does you far more harm than good. You are already a treasonous son of the flame, what’s one more coal-black mar, one more theft, upon your nameless honor? At least you now know you can fight just as well with the mask on as without.</p><hr/><p>Of further proof of the parade of mistakes you’ve made your life, you open your eyes from your interrupted nap to see a fox-faced, hunched over form crouching on the end of the branch you tied yourself to. You stare at each other, then you flick your fingers, testing your bending. Fire sparks around your fingers. “Okay then,” you say, slow and cautious.</p><p>“We have a job for you! A job for You!” the messenger says, grinning with at least seven canine teeth.</p><p>What’s the point of praying to spirits for food and safety if they just send you straight into danger anyways? Untying the rope around your waist, you begrudgingly asks, “What is it?”</p><p>“A hunt. A quest!” it barks.</p><p>You watch it cautiously, then swing yourself out of the trees and back onto the ground. There’s no running away from the spirits but having both of your feet on stable dirt gives you the illusion of choice between fighting back or fleeing.</p><p>The messenger fazes straight through the tree branch, still shrilly calling out, “We request an embodiment of air, of fire, of earth, of water.” It lurches at your face. “But air first.”</p><p>“And this will get my name back,” you confirm, just to be sure.</p><p>It bobs along amicably, feet churning through the air as it trots in circles around you, not one paw touching the dirt even once. Finally, it decides on, “In part. Your effort will get You’s name back.”</p><p>You begin walking through the trees just for something to do as the fox-faced messenger flips onto its back and leers at you from upside down. You ask, “What am I looking for?”</p><p>“An artifact in the east,” it cheerfully explains, “What was lent out hasn’t been returned. What was lent out must be returned. So, we send forth You so that what was lent out will be returned.”</p><p>East. East? “The <em>Eastern Air Temple?</em>”</p><p>The spirit flips back upright and huffs, “If You must call it that.”</p><p>You are nowhere near the Eastern Air Temple. You have no idea <em>where</em> the temple is exactly either. You have no idea what will be there or how to get there. This is an absolute disaster.</p><p>There’s no way you can back down.</p><p>So you ignore the spirits dogging your footsteps while you take a couple weeks scraping together enough money to buy an ostrich horse from a deeply suspicious breeder. That secure, you ride east and vaguely southward, along the eastern peninsula of the great Leopard’s Bay, until you hit the port town at its end. You sell the ostrich horse, breaking even on her value, and then begin the inglorious ordeal of learning how to sail a ship by yourself since no one wants to go anywhere near the mountainous islands of the air temple with you.</p><p>“Your job, your job,” the fox-faced messenger choruses exceedingly obnoxious in your ear.</p><p>“Shut up,” you snap at it, gritting your teeth at the ropes burning against your palm. “I’m working on it, unless you spirits will carry me to the temple without putting me into deeper debt.”</p><p>“Nope!” it replies and puffs into ephemeral nothingness.</p><p>But at least the messengers don’t overtly bother you as much anymore, letting you continue your exchange of service on the fishing boats for sailing lessons and practice in uneasy peace. Eventually, you cobble together enough skills and abilities that you think you can make it to the temples without getting smashed into pieces by the currents. You rent the smallest and cheapest boat you can find that won’t capsize at the barest nudge.</p><p>The next day, there are two foxes lounging in the shade of the inn’s front doorway. They come to attention at your exit from the building and trot along at your heels. A whole pack congregates at the piers when you cast off, a silently heckling crowd.</p><p>You set sail under clear weather, minimizing the chance of a storm drowning you and maximizing your chance of locating the right mountain to climb. Squinting through the spyglass you acquired, you pinpoint the hazy glint of what might be sunlight reflecting off the roof tiles of a tower. You sail towards the rocky shore.</p><hr/><p>When you reach the mountains and drag your boat onto the rocky shore enough so no tides can wash it back away, the realization that you’re going in the right direction comes easily enough when you suddenly stumble upon a lone discarded Fire Nation helmet covered in vegetation. Lifting the corroded metal and leather reveals no skull within. You drop it back to the ground and continue walking. It’s dead weight. You can’t keep it. But you look for more as you keep climbing, looking for marks of an army, impressions that could last a hundred years against wind and water and plants.</p><p>The mountains, for the most part, are a geometry of sheer cliffsides and damp vegetation and hauling yourself up hand over hand against the steep inclines. You had circled the base as much as you could, looking for a way up that troops in regiments could have traveled along – they must have reached the top <em>somehow</em> – but find little signs of anything except narrow ledges and almost vertical rock.</p><p>You grit your teeth and pull yourself along the narrow tightrope over overexerting yourself and knocking yourself unconscious with your unbalanced blood and bodily metabolism. The rocks scrape your fingers into a dirty mess. And up and up and up you go.</p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s quiet, in the air.</p><p> </p><hr/><p>When you reach the temple, muscles trembling, breath heaving, tendons burning, you weren’t expecting company, but here you are. “Hello traveler,” a man about as old as your late grandfather – maybe – calls out to you. What the hell? How did he get here?</p><p>Awkwardly, you lift your arm with tremendous effort and silently wave back.</p><p>He introduces himself, genially, as you draw a few steps closer, “I am Guru Pathik. There aren’t many visitors to the temples. Who are you?”</p><p>“Someone looking for something,” you tell the guru instead of thinking about how much you never want to hear that question again.</p><p>He draws his wiry frame sharp and hard. “You’d disturb this temple for a hunt?”</p><p>“I –” you pause and brace your hands against your hips and do your best at locking your legs, so you won’t fall over on your face in front of this man. He waits for you to look back up. You clarify, “I’m not looting. Or … not willingly. I need to fix a mistake.”</p><p>“Quite a mistake it must be, for you to travel all the way here,” the guru says.</p><p>You shrug and shake the hair that came out of your braid back out of your face. Company isn’t anything you remotely expected here, but now that it’s here and you’re here, maybe you can make some use out of it. Of course, he could double-cross you if you ask for his help, like too many in the Earth Kingdom easily had, all of you trying to survive for yourselves. But it says something doesn’t it, for someone to live alone with the wind up here where the air doesn’t feel right in your lungs and there are only the echoes clinging on against the merciless passage of time.</p><p>Your hope still isn’t enough to let you sit while he stands, so you don’t sit. You do say instead, “The spirits lent something years ago. It wasn’t returned and they want it back.”</p><p>Of course whatever this is wasn’t returned. There are holes smashed into the buildings, roofs collapsed in, and rotting tree trunks slumped against battered walls. There are plants growing in a free for all through cracks in the stone walkways and through open doorways. A hundred years.</p><p>“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” you mutter.</p><p>Guru Pathik runs a hand over his thick beard and for an insane second, the image of your uncle flashes through you, body and soul. It leaves you just as quickly in a blinding crash of lightning and you elect to completely ignore whatever the emotions rolling through your strained and weary limbs in a thunderous wake mean.</p><p>“The spirits?” he says. “Perhaps I can help you with that.”</p><hr/><p>Apparently, Guru Pathik’s been living– not squatting – here for years because of spiritual reasons. On a more cosmic level upon the individual instead of the kind of spiritual you’ve unwillingly gotten too familiar with. He offers you something yellow and with an eyewatering smell as the sun sets and you take it because you never refuse food anymore.</p><p>You’ve eaten worse. It’s still undeniably one of the weirdest things you’ve eaten.</p><p>He also, it turns out, knows how to roll out knots and stretch your limbs in a way you haven’t experienced since years ago when your family went on more vacations to resorts and beaches with masseuses. When he’s done with you, it’s all you can do to lay on the chilling stones, feeling like freshly pounded mochi. It does mean that the next day, you’re able to more than hobble your way through the temple, behind the guru giving you a tour of where could be more helpful.</p><p>There isn’t a lot. There are corners still stained with ash. There are rooms taken over by the rain and the birds. There are walls bleached by the sun, draining away the color from the murals painted from the floor to the ceiling. There is rubble and debris everywhere, that would take too long and too much effort for the two of you to clear away.</p><p>There are libraries, crumbling into pieces.</p><p>“From the Air Nomads’ travels,” Guru Pathik tells you. “Information and stories from all over the world, as the winds took them. Though, not the kind of information and stories you and I may be used to.”</p><p>“It’s a start,” you tell him, and gently pull the first scroll out.</p><p>But you do not know how to treat the fragile, ancient scrolls any better than the years have mistreated them. The resins on the wooden parts are cracked and flaking. The paper of some scrolls has rotten and comes apart in your hands. Ink rusts. And to make matters worse, you can’t make heads or tails of any kind of organizational structure to the shelves and piles you find and you can barely read what <em>has</em> survived a century.</p><p>Dredging up your lessons on the olden script used before the simplification imposed by Azulon’s reign so more soldiers could attain promotion easier, you muddle your way through what remains to be read.</p><p>Which … You learn how they farm, how they steam their bread with a steadily controlled stream of air. You learn how they travel, how they carry news and gossip to every corner of the world, the way the upper atmosphere winds carry pollen and seeds. You learn about their bison – you learn a <em>lot</em> about their bison – how to feed a herd, to muck out their stalls, to comb their shedding fur, to tend to their illnesses, to birth their calves, to fit them with a saddle, to –</p><p>“How is <em>any</em> of this supposed to help me,” you almost yell in frustration a few days later, rubbing your thumbs against your strained eyes. “None of this says anything about interactions with the spirits, let alone some artifact.”</p><p>It’s been over a week since you last saw one of the fox-faced messengers and you almost wish one would obnoxiously show up again, just so you’d have an opportunity to grab it and shake it until more answers fall out. In reality, your chances of laying your hands on one of the spirits is nonexistent, but you vividly dream.</p><p>“I’m going about this wrong,” you say one morning as Guru Pathik tries cajoling you with another bowl of onion banana juice which you honestly don’t need. “The Air Nomads didn’t have many possessions. Finding what I need should be an easy process of elimination.”</p><p>“You’d overturn the whole temple in your search?”</p><p>Though uneasy, you look at him and say firmly, “That may be what it takes.”</p><hr/><p>Along that misty border between dream and something <em>else</em>, you are alone with only the wind howling as it rushes off the cliff. You are alone with only the charred bodies, picked clean to the bone, watching.</p><p>In the dream: Heat shines down hard from its traveling throne in the sky. You are alone among the living. You are not alone among the dead, the bodies that you know, molasses slow, were cleared away by someone else in the waking world. You are not alone with the angry wind.</p><p>The sun and rains have long drained the color from the disintegrating robes and your tentative touch crumbles the threads further.</p><p>There was an army, a tired voice says in the back of your mind, worn out like something blasted by the desert sands, by all you have seen of the destruction and blood in the Earth Kingdom. They had the Avatar who wielded indisputable might. Fire is not an element of defense; it was only logical that –</p><p>How old was the Avatar supposed to have been? Your age? Older? No one refers to the Avatar after Roku by name, so they hadn’t been presented to the world yet, meaning – young. They were young.</p><p><em>All</em> the Air Nomads are gone. Azula, Ty Lee, Mai, and you may have been trained young, but that didn’t make you parts of the army. Azula just began wearing armor when you saw her last, in deference to her royal status and not from military experience. Lu Ten didn’t start his training in the army proper until he was fifteen. All the Air Nomads are dead so that must mean –</p><p>The sun. It’s so hot against your back, against your bowed head.</p><p>In the great tower at the peak, you find the densest gathering of bones and smoke-stained fabric, where they fled the incursion boiling up from below into the air that should have promised freedom and only gave choking poison. A single harsh laugh barks out of you, unbidden. Alarmed, you slap a hand over your mouth, as if that can contain the echo mirroring your fatigued bitterness.</p><p>You draw your hand away slowly. You say into the dusty and rain-stained silence, “There were no armies.”</p><p><em>Yes</em>, the silence of the thin, tiny bones responds, <em>there was only one army and it bore flames</em>.</p><p>An army wouldn’t huddle in fear, draped over each other in futile protection. An army wouldn’t wear no armor, not even a scrap of harden leather to be found. An army wouldn’t go tumbling for the windows and the plunge.</p><p>The sun moves on in its path through the sky. Shadows return through the holes in the walls and the roof.</p><hr/><p>You give the scrolls one last go.</p><p>By the time ancient scripts start floating through your chaotic dreams of running away from <em>something</em>, you run into an interesting half-disintegrated and water-damaged scroll on temperature control. Namely, every master airbender could walk around the arctic poles shirtless and suffer no consequences. How’d they manage that?</p><p>The illustrations do <em>not</em> bring about any further clarity and time has eaten half the script. You bring the scroll to Guru Pathik, who you find once again practically on the roofs which cannot be physically sound for how much time he spends on them.</p><p>“Do you know how to do this?” you ask, showing him your passage of interest.</p><p>“I am not an airbender,” he says, amused.</p><p>You ignore this. “You’re the closest to an airbender I’m going to ever find outside of the Spirit World,” you tell him.</p><p>“I am not a bender,” he amends, still amused.</p><p>“This isn’t about bending, this is about –” you make a noise as you try to think, “This is about worldview. Or something. Something about … I don’t think I’m translating this correctly.”</p><p>Finally, the guru gives the scroll a closer look. You read over what you can again. On the most basic level, you think it’s talking about air currents and how to catch a rising warm wind over a heavier, colder air. But all this discussion folds into one cut-off passage about inner chi and dispassion and “an alleviation of restraints.”</p><p>“Bear an open mind,” Guru Pathik says. “Each martial form’s flow of chi is not rigidly limited to each element. Each element represents something different which brings its strength, but without acknowledging how the elements interact, benders weaken themselves.</p><p>“Air abstains from restraints. It flows freely through and around us, parting away from direct attack. The masters likely control the flow of hot and cold in their bodies with the same ease they navigate the currents.”</p><p>You give the scroll another squint, trying to decipher the damaged and smeared text. Making guesses, you ask, “Controlling warmth?”</p><p>“Perhaps,” he acknowledges.</p><p>You won’t always manage to avoid winter. The Fire Nation’s hold of the northern Earth Kingdom territories strengthens with each season and soon enough, you’ll be pinned into the southern districts when the temperature drops. Figuring out how this works and if you can learn it too, despite being a firebender, could be a matter of life and death out on the road.</p><p>Firebenders with sufficient control can elevate their body temperatures and counteract environmental cold that way but done for too long and the body begins deteriorating from a self-induced fever. And obviously, cupping open flame in your hands in the Earth Kingdom is a flagrant death wish.</p><p>Not to mention the additional issue of … well, you think your bending’s been suffering. It must be. You set your swords on fire a couple weeks back. No one in the Fire Nation would ever consider something so sloppy and roughshod like that. Your aim’s still precise, but there’s no telling how many mistakes you’re crystalizing in your forms as you get into more and more brawls instead of spars. And you haven’t been practicing nearly as much as you should.</p><p>But if the Air Nomads could control <em>warmth</em>, then why can’t you, a firebender, control warmth as well? Steam from a boiling pot can burn skin and hot metal can burn flesh. You don’t need flame for warmth. If you can wield heat <em>without</em> the flame, maybe you can finally practice every day again. And fight better. And survive winter. That last one’s the most important.  </p><hr/><p>“Are there prayers where you can ask for forgiveness?” you ask Guru Pathik one clear dawn. Research isn’t getting you the answers you need and it’s time for you to do what you should have since the moment you arrived here: start digging through all the remains in the temples until you hit upon a likely candidate.</p><p>He shakes his head no. “Not for what you intend to do. But we can be as respectful as we can be.”</p><p>“We?” you warily say.</p><p>For the couple of weeks you’ve spent at the temple, you and the guru actually haven’t spent that much time together. You easily go a full day without glimpsing him once as you hunt for clues. On a subliminal level you can’t articulate, he makes you uncomfortable. It’s not that he makes a point of digging at what could have led a spirit-cursed Fire Nation citizen to rooting around in the ruins of an Air Temple. Nor does he say anything explicit towards you about how you rise with the sun or how when you cup your hands and breathe warmth back into your fingers there are flickers of orange.</p><p>He holds his peace, patiently but knowingly, and maybe that’s what you can’t stomach facing head on.</p><p>“Many hands make light work,” he says serenely. “And I could help explain what the things you find are supposed to be used for.”</p><p>You shift your weight from side to side, not quite bouncing. You don’t understand why he’s offering his help in this way <em>now</em>; maybe he just wants you gone already, your search having taken more time than either of you anticipated. Maybe he just wants to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t steal more than you claim you’re here for, make sure you don’t cause even more disrespect to the windswept ruins.</p><p>Guru Pathik continues half-smiling at you. His accompanying you isn’t up for debate.</p><p>“Okay,” you grudgingly concede.</p><p>You begin your search on the most westward tower. As you suspect, the architecture of the temples is <em>not</em> stable anymore, as exemplified when one of the great bridges between the three main segments nearly collapses under you and attempts to hurl you towards your death. You scamper across and refuse to give any thoughts to the mist obscuring the ground far, far below your feet or how the Air Nomads apparently didn’t put any stock into the necessity of guard rails or barriers around their plazas and balconies. Fine, yes, they can all fly, plummeting to their death isn’t as likely for them as anyone else, but still. Surely they must receive non-airbending visitors.</p><p>In your hunt you find: a lot of insect-chewed cloth, what Guru Pathik tells you are components for an air bison’s saddle, a pot of powdery dye that makes you sneeze unendingly, more scraps of cloth and colored paper, an extremely fermented jar of juice from some unknown origin, and two chipped and splintering spinning wheels.</p><p>The guru calls for a lunch break and you shrug and accept a single small plum. You aren’t really hungry. Chasing the plum’s sweet juice before it can get all over your fingers, you say, “I hope the artifact’s not broken.”</p><p>That would be unbearably awkward.</p><p>He has another bowl of freshly prepared fruit mashed with onion, a kind of rice-like berry this time, and between sips he considers your words and says, “Gifts and trinkets from the Spirit World are generally sturdier than what humans can make. A drop from here to the seas wouldn’t be enough to break most spirit objects.”</p><p>That’s great news, except now you’re preoccupied with the worry that someone might have chucked what you’re looking for into the forests below and you’d really be in a fix then.</p><p>The moment he finishes his bowl, you tell him, “I’m going to keep looking,” and set off. Scouring the whole tower takes the better part of a day and a half. You turn up nothing that seems like it came from the Spirit World.</p><hr/><p>You can and will break into the rooms sealed away with airbending locks if you have to.</p><p>“Let’s not jump to that yet,” your chaperon tells you and guides you away with a firm hand against your shoulder.</p><hr/><p>On a morning that already started off badly when you woke up with a deep and all consuming craving for the jeweled fish the palace cooks sautéed with slices of ginger and tender bamboo shoots and the freshest star anise the kitchens could procure, <em>which you will never get to eat again</em>, Guru Pathik accompanies you into the nurseries.</p><p>Cribs, apparently, don’t change design that much between nations and centuries. You tiredly stare at their dust covered forms for longer than you mean to, weariness and history heavy on your head.</p><p>There are many cribs.</p><p>Everything is great.</p><p>“Where are the bodies?” you ask towards the dust. There must be bodies. The Fire Nation army wouldn’t spend time burying the dead they just killed. They aren’t with the Earth Kingdom. There are skeletons in shallow rows here and there among the grass and the dirt, bones at the base of cracked and shoot-covered stone coins, the smell of rot and sweat and vomit and blood in forests. Everywhere the army goes, there’s the mess of torn up dirt and charred plants. If there are cribs, there should be bodies.</p><p>“They’re at rest,” Guru Pathik says.</p><p>At rest. Who put them to rest? The guru? Someone else, earlier during the war, before whole generations of every nation were chewed up by the killing machine, who heard and grieved and knew to mourn? And how do you put a people with the wind’s freedom in their veins to rest?</p><p>On the home islands, where there isn’t enough land to bury every of the many dead, you would light pyres until everything returned to ashes. In the Earth Kingdom, where there is enough land for their even more dead, they place their bodies in the ground. You’re not sure what the Water Tribes do, but they live at the poles which means more ice than dirt.</p><p>How does anyone even start putting to rights the wrongs your family has spread?</p><p>You nod and huff out a deep breath.</p><p>Knocked almost behind a table, half covered by old cloth, there is a flute carved from ivory and engraved with swirling clouds. When you reach out to it, before your fingertips make contact, you feel the brush of a faint hum and the resentful thrum of silenced melodic notes. After a second’s hesitation, you pick it up anyways and brush away dirt from the threads of inlaid oyster shell.</p><p>You straighten from your crouch and hold it out. “Here.”</p><p>The guru makes a considering noise and says, “That certainly doesn’t fit with what the Air Nomads would make.”</p><p>He doesn’t take it.</p><p>Rubbing a thumb along its side, you consider how to secure it in your pack. You tell him, “I’ll be going tomorrow then.”</p><p>He smiles and you don’t examine what, <em>who</em>, that reminds you of. “Very well then traveler. I’ll see you off tomorrow when the sun rises.”</p><hr/><p>The sun rises as it always does and before you begin your descent back down the cliffs and mountains, you look one last time at the broken towers. You look at the trees and plants growing wild and unbending to the wind, whispering to each other in the breeze, standing vigil side-by-side with the solemn statues of unfamiliar nuns.</p><p>It’s quiet, in the air.</p><hr/><p>There are nine foxes waiting for you at the piers when you return. Everyone at the docks refuses to look at them or interact with them, giving their statue still forms a wide berth. The fox in the middle of the pack bounds forward while you secure the boat and launches itself, screaming, at your shoulders. You yell back in confusion. Anyone that was around scatters.</p><p>It yanks your pack off you and sprints away with a kick that barely misses your head. En masse, the other foxes fall into formation after it. You spend the rest of the afternoon chasing after them, shouting for your money and supplies back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sometimes, the inspiration to write doesn’t come until you’re in the doctor’s office waiting for the localized anesthesia to be prepped.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>A bitter anxiety fills your mouth as you stare up and up at the walls before you. Ba Sing Se.</i>
</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Consistent chapter lengths? In my fic?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You’ve spent enough time in enough places, taking jobs and buying food, that anyone with an iota of care for finding you would have found you by now. Except for when you skirted along the desert, your trail can’t be that hard to pick up. And it can’t be that hard to follow hearsay about a teenager with a burn scar healed messily and ugly across the left side of his face. There aren’t many of those around. Out of the general wariness necessary for living in an invaded land, you watch your tails and for any of the wide range of people you piss off from when you don’t hand your belongings over or get into fights with over how they yell after too many drinks of baijiu.</p><p>No one follows you. Sometimes, when you stray too far west and you see red flags in the valley below you, you lay on your chest, an ear pressed against the ground and your palms flat against the dirt in case you can feel the tremors grow. They never do, no more than their path pushed across a map by a general in a room far away dictates.</p><p>No one’s looking for you, no one cares about where you go, as long as you never show your face on Fire Nation land again. Why should anyone look for you? You could go to the arctic poles or disappear into a cave deep underground for all your family cares.</p><p>Who’s going to look at the dirty boy with long hair put into a messy braid, draped in grass green cloth, covered in the nicks and scars of rough living, and see the Fire Nation’s remaining young traitorous prince? Who’s going to look at the dirt under your bitten short nails and your rough knuckles and see a former crown prince?</p><p>You lay on a roof, staring at the small clouds above, a welcome reprieve from a week of rain, on what might be the anniversary of your father throwing you away. Or maybe the anniversary was last week. Or maybe it is next week.</p><p>Or maybe, you tell yourself bitterly, it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. You are gone, you are a traitor many times over, Azula gets her throne, the Fire Nation grinds its people into paste winning and losing ground in an embattled land comprised of people literally more stubborn than stone and with absolutely none of metal’s malleability.</p><p>No one looked for your mother. No one will look for you.</p><hr/><p>You don’t <em>mean</em> to make a name for yourself; you just wanted to make your way back northward in peace. But there are these bastards, see, hoarding all the rice and grain in a village that clearly won’t survive the oncoming winter without the food stores. The only way these widows and orphans could get a mealy mouthful is by draining all their blood money from sending husbands, sons, and brothers into the war. You especially get nothing when you ask politely.</p><p>So you slip on the Blue Spirit mask you can hide despite how terrified you are of the consequences of losing it – you can’t hide the scar on your face, so the mask you can take on and off shall be your face – and circle back around to town a few days later. And then you get in some fighting practice by beating up all the thugs, trussing them up from the balcony of the village’s tallest building for their judgment, and redistributing the food to the villagers and yourself.</p><p>Then five days later, you escort a terrified couple and their toddler to safety from a sprinting tiger boar the size of a horse, which was a horrifying experience and you never saw death so many times in such a short span. And a week after, you pull a well-deserved heist on a bar full of conmen. A month later, you fling yourself out of a tree in shock when a man smiles and waves when he catches a glimpse of you and calls out, “Hello there, Mr. Blue Spirit.”</p><p>There’s no way the spirits don’t have some sort of opinion on this development of events. But every one of your questions about whether this will increase the debt on your <em>loan</em> goes unanswered, in typical fashion.</p><p>After two weeks of working yourself into a state on this matter, you resolve that it’s out of your hands, and anyways, it’s not like anyone’s physically capable of calling you anything else.</p><p>Frankly, you’ve been getting into enough fights and trouble scrapping a life together since arriving at the Earth Kingdom that you cannot tell how much your increased ability to weather hits, to deal blows, to walk unending under the sun without food comes naturally or not. You don’t even realize how much less you eat until enough petty thieves clue onto your unusually heavy pockets. Less money spent on food and water means more money in your purse and a bigger target, after all.</p><hr/><p>A boy with missing front teeth squints at you. “You don’t fight right,” he tells you.</p><p>Biting into a plum, you glance down at him. “Yeah?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he nods in his infantile wisdom. He mimes the punches and stomps of earthbenders, going, “You’re supposed to go <em>whoosh</em> and <em>bam</em> and <em>ka-pow!</em> And ‘Rockslide Finisher!’”</p><p>“What,” you mutter in incomprehension.</p><p>The kid stops flailing and tells you, “Like the Earthquake. Or the Rhino.”</p><p>“The <em>who</em>?” So poleaxed by the sudden onslaught of confusion, your fingers loosely grip your now forgotten and half-eaten plum as you scowl down on the boy, failing in puzzling out what weird new stories the Earth Kingdom kids are spreading in their play these days.</p><p>“<em>You don’t know who the Earthquake is?</em>” the boy screeches. “The Earthquake is the champion of the Giyang Earth Rumble. He’s the <em>best</em>, how do you <em>not know</em> him?”</p><p>You wince at the volume. “I’ve never been to an Earth Rumble before,” you defend yourself, which turns out to be the wrong thing to say as his expression caves in, gutted and wretched. Like he has any right to that, as if you held him captive and forced him to strangle a flock of turtle ducklings with his own bare hands.</p><p>He droops and says slow and disappointed at the cruel reality of this uncaring world, “You’ve never been to an Earth Rumble before.”</p><p>“I’ve been busy,” you snap.</p><p>The kid sprints away from you, howling for his friends.</p><p>Well, whatever. You haven’t been desperate enough to stage fight for cash more than one or two times and frankly, watching people fight when you can’t get something out of it isn’t money you’re willing to waste. And since Earth Rumbles don’t let anyone except earthbenders compete, even the most painfully amateur hopeful that managed to avoid the army conscripts, you never bother with the tournaments.</p><p>As far as you can tell, the Earth Rumbles began recently, spreading steadily out of the south. Born out of one part nationalistic pride and another part gloating at the distance away from the battlefields which scrub the reality of the war into a background hum, they aren’t even good for training.</p><p>The Earth Rumbles definitely aren’t going to help you when you’re standing shin-deep in a barely moving river, shoving your hands into the water, and trying to grab at the sensation of <em>heat</em> wafting up from the bubbling water’s steam. You’re still knocking your head against the idea of heat manipulation that followed you doggedly out of the Eastern Air Temple. At first, you tried practicing with your campfire, but your bending kept being distracted by the flames. Licks of red kept trailing over your fingers.</p><p>And so, sticking you hands into bodies of water. It almost reminds you of your resistance training against the cold, what little you received.</p><p>You wiggle your flameless but definitely hot fingers.</p><p>In terms of fighting, this flameless heat will be weaker than the traditional forms. It’s not a mater of purity; Azula’s blue flames consume its fuel more efficiently and powerfully than anyone’s orange and red flames. As she gets older and even <em>stronger</em>, she’ll probably manage clear flame one day, as she refines her skills even further.</p><p>You aren’t trying to create flames in the first place.</p><p>Slowly, you slide one hand out of the water and into the steam above. Your skin’s red and you can’t keep trying for long. With furrowed brow, you fold your fingers into a fist, clenching and thinking, <em>it’s not air, it’s not hot air, it’s heat, just like there’s heat from the sun and heat in metal drawn from the forge and heat in the steam. </em></p><p><em>Come ON</em>.</p><p>Hand tingling like you’re shaking awake numbed nerves, you sweep your fist to the side.</p><p>Colder air hits your knuckles. The steam’s heat stays persistently stuck in place, barely wavering.</p><p>Frustrated anger rushes down your neck and you stand up and scrub both wet hands through your hair. This isn’t even possible, it’s only something airbenders can do. You’re just wasting your time and energy splashing around in mud and over hard river stones that stab at your feet. All of this is a waste. If this was possible, why hadn’t someone else already figured it out? Why do you remotely think you can figure this out? You’re not the genius of your family. All your family members are better benders than you.</p><p>“Damn it,” you say, just to scope up and hurl something out of your chest. “Who am I kidding.”</p><hr/><p>When you wake up, there’s a fox sitting on your feet. You curse at it.</p><p>“You done yet?” it asks you when you pause for breath and try wrenching your feet from under its inexplicable weight.</p><p>Just to spite it and yourself, you curse at it once more. It scrunches its nose and the three eyes along the crown of its head squint at you. Its tongue lolls out and licks along its long, long jaw. When your foot yanks towards the right, it pins your shin down with one firmly placed, clawed paw. It reprimands you, “Now, now, no need to be so rude.”</p><p>“Fine, let’s just get this over with,” you say as you collapse back onto the ground, staring sullenly at the tarp over your head. Rain drums against its waxed surface.</p><p>The messenger walks over your stomach and pokes you in the kidney a few times more than necessary and settles on your chest. You regret laying back down.</p><p>“This is more comfortable,” it decides. “Now, yes, certainly, your job.”</p><p>It wriggles. You open your mouth. It shoves a tail in your mouth.</p><p>Ignoring your hacking and your attempts to shove it off your chest, it says, “Certainly, verily, quite, your job. Now, then, when. Seek fire, that’s Your job.”</p><p>At this angle, your arms really don’t have enough leverage against the messenger’s immovable weight. “Can you <em>please</em> be more specific. It took me weeks to figure out what you wanted last time.”</p><p>“Seek fire to the right of the sun’s path among the treasure of a hoard of thieves. What was stolen must be returned, quickly.”</p><p>Then, to your great and urgent alarm, the messenger begins making a <em>hurk</em> kind of noise and coughs something slimy and hard onto you. Trauma inflicted, it promptly vanishes off to wherever spirits go when they aren’t annoying and horrifying humans. You lurch up from the ground and the wet something rolls down your chest, spreading its slime. Your head smacks into your tarp.</p><p>“<em>Why</em>,” you howl.</p><hr/><p>Had the messenger been anything other than an otherworldly harbinger of chaos, it probably would have scratched its throat into shreds hacking up the basalt seal stamp.</p><p>The stamp fits snuggly in your hand and when you flip its carved phoenix on its head, you can’t figure out what the seal carved onto its bottom says. You think it’s just some ancient script no one ever taught you because all the laws that old have already been summarily overturned and any lingering ceremonies translated into modern texts. At the same time, why should the Spirit World restrict itself to human script. Maybe it’s a language only spirits can read.</p><p>Unlike the flute, the seal lays inert as an innocuous gray hunk of rock in your bag. But the bird’s eyes are carved out and small holes dimple its feathers. Its claws curl around a sphere of empty space. You don’t doubt the real deal’s inlaid with gems and pearls. No one’s going to steal a plain and incomplete stamp like this with no obvious family seal to sign counterfeit documents with. Besides, only the gaudiest of Fire Nation nobles would commission a stamp carved with a phoenix.</p><hr/><p>Okay, you try to stay on the right side of things as much as you can, even if there’s barely any point in talking about abstract things like pride and virtue when you’re stripped of your titles, your name, and your ancestors. You’ve absolutely stole plenty of things before. But sometimes, a guy’s pants are on the verge of falling apart and no amount of repairs will help you anymore. And you don’t have enough money for a new set of clothing, because that’s right, your shirts are also getting too tight at the shoulders. And the store owner of the next town you roll into says things like, “We don’t have anything because our normal suppliers ran into some trouble. But if you get in contact with Lee’s crew and help him out, I can probably give you a discount.”</p><p>She sizes you up, eyes flicking from the swords against your back and your sleeves exposing a mile of your wrists.</p><p>“Lee’s crew? Where can I find them?” you ask.</p><p>And then, after you slog your way through three-fourth of a mile of thorny bramble and territorial, divebombing birds, it turns out that Lee’s crew is a band of local smugglers.</p><p>So, you’re familiar with this type.</p><p>Uncovering the local smuggling gangs doesn’t take more than asking around a select handful of shady characters for where a fellow can get his hands on some heavily discounted writs of business or false passports. The helpful residents of Judong point you towards a couple trusted options they favor and a half-dozen rumors of other rings. If there’s anyone making money hand over fist in this war, it’s the criminal rings more willing to run risky business than the legitimate merchants.</p><p>Judong’s at best stretching its way into a mid-tier city though, so the smugglers you track down are small fish in the grand scheme of things.</p><p>Doesn’t stop you from laying siege to a couple of their camps.</p><p>“Who the hell are you?” hollers a disarmed pikeman scrambling backwards on his hands as far away from your swords as he can.</p><p>You say through your mask, “I asked nicely already. Who are your fences for high-quality goods?”</p><p>“You’re crazy!” the smugger yells, still insensible. He glances desperately at his downed compatriots and kicks nonsensically at you. No help’s coming from there though; you know how hard you knocked them all out. Well, okay, you hadn’t meant to knock out that one guy when you shoulder checked him and accidentally sent the poor soul flying into a tree which he then smashed his head against.</p><p>Actually, that might had been the point when the camp all started panicking.</p><p>“Tell me your fences and I won’t have to set fire to all your provisions,” you threaten.</p><p>After a few more seconds of witless screaming, you finally get a name.</p><hr/><p>It turns out that trying to discretely ask the bartender of an outpost tavern where you can find someone named Ling Ren instantly triggers a barfight when the person sitting at the table behind you overhears your question and immediately goes into a tirade about petty thieves scamming respectable people out of honest contracts. To which the folks by the wall who had been hostilely watching the table since before you stepped into the bar started jeering at them about lies and slander, then someone mishears an insult, and now you’re ducking a half-empty bottle of alcohol and swinging a chair leg at someone charging at you.</p><p>Why do these things keep happening to you.</p><p>Half the staff, including the bartender, already vacated the premise as best you can see, busy with throwing all the drunk earthbenders outside before they could shatter all the cups and any more walls. You yourself fling your splintering chair leg at someone stumbling towards your left side and slide under a stray sword swinging at the woman to your right.</p><p>You flip over a table right before a body crashes into its surface from the second floor’s open hallways. A knife hurtles past your right ear. Another tremor shivers through the ground from outside the propped open front doors.</p><p>Jumping onto and off of the shoulders of a man in patchy leather armor, you tumble out of said doors. Out here, the chaos isn’t much better.</p><p>“Damn it. Okay,” you hiss and set off sprinting for where you think you see the staff thrashing their unruly patrons.</p><p>Your sheathed swords slam against the back of hammer wielding customer and he crumples with a surprised shout. It’s the guy who started this whole mess by overhearing your question. With exasperated prejudice, you step harder than really necessary on his chest to launch yourself at one of his friends in the middle of bending a column of rock at a waiter. You collide with the bender at the exact same moment the bartender smoothly slides into the path of the rock and punches it into pebbles.</p><p>Between your swords and the staff’s skill, you subdue the belligerent fighters and send them packing.</p><p>“Hey, uh,” you say as the bartender examines his hands with a giant huff of annoyed breath. “If I help clean up the mess inside, will you answer my question?”</p><p>He looks up and says, “What? Oh, you, yeah sure. Come on, they should be wearing themselves out by now. You can help me collect all their money in their possession to pay for repairs.”</p><p>The fighting winds down and a few minutes later, the bartender – “Call me Tang.” “Really?” – sets down a new drink before you after turning his attention to tidying up his counter and addressing his dust and blood covered hands.</p><p>You drink the sweet liquid and Tang thoughtfully blots the mess from his hands with a damp towel as he thinks. He says, “Ling Ren works for a couple bands, far as I can tell. If you’re looking for a group that can get you the nice stuff, there’s either the Wolfbat Gang based further north or the King’s Defiance to the east.”</p><p>He glances at your second- and third-hand clothing and skeptically says, “It’ll cost you to do business with them.”</p><p>“I didn’t expect anything else,” you blandly say with absolutely no intentions of paying anyone anything.</p><p>Shrugging, Tang lifts the towel away from his wounds and, satisfied that the blood’s begun clotting and scabbing over, he shakes out the cloth and folds it into neat thirds. “Well, whatever,” he says. “Good luck.”</p><p>“Thanks,” you say and flick him a silver coin for the tip.</p><hr/><p>The foxes check in on you like the enforcers of a loan shark while you’re on your way east.</p><p>“I’m working on it,” you tell them as you check on the rapidly fading bruises along your side. You still can’t believe you got into another bar fight like that, even more so since the fight started between other people and not because someone insulted your face again.</p><p>“So slow,” the fox on your left whines. Its eyes blink in a wave and its rightward ears twitch in rapid flicks.</p><p>“None of your hints are that helpful,” you say hotly and slip your shirt back on. Another fox lolling about on its back kicks at the air with high laughing yips that reminds you of metal scraping against metal.</p><p>“So <em>slow</em>,” the first fox complains again and slumps over into a liquid pool of resentful fur. The second fox laughs even harder.</p><p>It must still be laughing when you locate the King’s Defiance gang and they summarily turn you away when you make inquires about a phoenix stamp.</p><p>“Fuck off, kid,” one of the grunts says. “We ain’t giving you shit if you can’t pay.”</p><p>“It’s just a yes or no,” you say back.</p><p>His buddy smiles nastily with a mouth missing several teeth. “Like he said. We ain’t giving you shit if you can’t pay.”</p><p><em>Very well</em>, you decide and five minutes later launch yourself from the tree branches into the camp with fire dancing along your blades. They had a chance to give you a simple yes or no and now you’ll just take your information by force the hard way.</p><p>“<em>What the fuck Kun</em>,” one of the thieves screams. “<em>Don’t you have a fucking job to do you idiot piece of shit</em>.”</p><p>The rest of the band comes streaming out of the tents and temporary building erected in the clearing you swiftly fill with fire corralling your opponents into coming at you in single file. Someone futilely tries putting out the flames with buckets of water. There’s a yell, “Gods damn colony brats.”</p><p>You plow your way through them and this time when you bodily throw someone through a wall, it’s on purpose. The strength still comes as a surprise to you, but you’re not looking a gift ostrich horse in the beak. You leap through the hole you created and land in a room filled with items of questionable authenticity to the label “antique.”</p><p>“Kill him!” goes the incensed crowd outside and a well thrown club knocks one of your swords out of your hands.</p><p>In return, you snatch up the closest stone statue from a shelf and clobber the first person who tries climbing through the wall after you. They fly back with a breathless wheeze. You might be getting too much catharsis out of this fight after four hours of continuously being laughed at by a spirit fox with six faces.</p><p>But in the end, despite their numbers, the thieves apparently don’t have any benders among their members and the whole band eventually falls to your assault. Finally certain you won’t be bothered for a few minutes, you survey all of their goods, cracking open all their locked boxes and vaults.</p><p>You find plenty of counterfeit scrolls and forged paintings and maybe even some true statues and weapons smithed by masters. There are albatross elephant seal stamps with garnet eyes and lizard hound seal stamps with aquamarine collars and cherry nut blossom seal stamps with rose quartz petals.</p><p>No phoenix stamps.</p><p>Out of annoyance, you scope up a couple bags of genuine coins and walk away from the destruction you caused.</p><hr/><p>At first it seems like the Wolfbat Gang will also disappoint you, when one of their guards wises up to who you are and what you’ve been doing recently and says, “Hold up, you’re looking for Ling Ren too, aren’t you?”</p><p>“Sort of,” you say and leave the matter at that.</p><p>“Yeah, we don’t have this thing anymore,” she says and tosses the basalt stamp clue back at you. “Haven’t for a while. But we can help you get it if you help us track down Ling Ren. The bastard set us up for an ambush from a bunch of stupid upstarts trying to invade our territory and the boss is still stuck with a broken leg.”</p><p>“That’s your trade? Ling Ren for this stamp?” you suspiciously ask.</p><p>She leans back with her hands tucked into her pockets and grins up at you. “Honestly, kid, you already did us a huge favor fucking up our greatest rival like that. So yeah, that’s the trade.”</p><p>You toss the stamp back into your bag and tell her, “If I did such a big favor for you, then I demand a different trade.”</p><hr/><p>The false room Ling Ren hides himself in fools everyone else from the Wolfbat Gang that comes hunting with you, but you feel yourself yanked forwards by a faint buzzing tug.</p><p>“Hold up,” you tell them and start rapping your knuckles against the wall, until <em>there</em>. That feels hollower and the tug’s strongest there. Rin, the Wolfbat member you talked with first, the sixth Rin you’ve ever met so far, nods you aside. She backs up and with one solid kick, smashes the hidden door in.</p><p>A shriek comes out from the dust and Rin prowls in. You stay outside as the gang members conduct their business and the captured man inside cravenly begs for mercy. After a few minutes of once gain internally debating the origin of all your troubles, Rin comes back out and tosses something small and glinting at you.</p><p>You catch a stamp made out of what looks like pure diamond. What had been gray on its lesser basalt sibling instead gleams polished yellow and orange. In the phoenix’s clutches lays a large pearl as you expected and tiny ruby and garnet gems line its feathers. Two black tourmaline eyes stare at you above a sharp beak. Heat curls in your palm with the promise of ashen lightning.</p><p>Rin folds her arms and glares at the stamp, ignoring the procession behind her. “That thing’s unnatural,” she says. “No one wanted anything to do with it, even if it isn’t all quartz. The hell you planning on doing with it?”</p><p>“Returning it to its original owners,” you say while rubbing your thumb, entranced, against its heat. You hadn’t felt anything this alluring with the flute, but you can’t help turning the stamp this way and that, watching the light caught inside generate the illusion of flames. Being royal, your training never involved holding a live coal as some of the commoners do, and you think this feels similar, if with a stronger, conscious will than an inert rock.</p><p>There’s a heat to it, a flameless heat.</p><p>Swallowing, you tuck the stamp into your shirt where it can’t fall out and look over to see Rin watching you with an assessing eye. She snorts a half-laugh at your attention and says, “You’re definitely a firebender, kid. Shit, you don’t ask for a lot, huh?</p><p>“You know Full Moon Bay? Give us a few weeks to meet up with you to its northeast. There’s a tall hill with a giant dead tree on top couple miles south of Ba Sing Se’s walls. It’s gonna take us a while to get you paperwork strong enough to smuggle a colony bastard like you into the Lower Ring.”</p><hr/><p>The desert unrolls before you.</p><p>In the valley between two dunes, there’s no one there to see you train what you can on your own. If the last several weeks of chasing criminals and picking constant fights have shown anything to you, is that you’re still not accounting for your altered hearing in your left ear enough. Too many of your opponents came too close to your inhibited side and your responses are sloppy.</p><p>So as the sun sets and the sands slowly cool, you run through the sets you remember and bludgeon back any thoughts about the sets you don’t remember and, worse, the sets you never learned. Because, so what, you’ve fought well enough, haven’t you? And you’re never going to see your family again or the frontlines.</p><p>You’re not.</p><p>You stretch out your legs against the hot sand and sink your fingers into the grains beside your feet. After you split ways from the thieves and began meandering your path along the northern border of the Si Wong Desert, the foxes reappeared to collect their due. The fox that’d laughed at you so much before, with the stripes of purple-silver among its black and red, only grinned wide and knowingly at you this visit. The other fox held the stamp in its mouth with a careful grip on the carved phoenix and bound away with it without a single <em>thank you</em> or acknowledgement to you.</p><p>But before they did, alone in your camp every night during the few days between retrieval and delivery, you pull out the stamp and spin it between your fingers. It hums and tremors with a low melody of percussive beats.</p><p>And maybe you’d been going about your attempts the wrong way before. Steam would never work as a starting point because that never was purely about heat; there’s too much water. Earthbending, you know now, doesn’t start with mud. Nor does fire start with lava. If there’s any hope that your exile hasn’t permanently destroyed your senses, you’ll have to find somewhere stripped of all water.</p><p>You don’t think too hard about how the oppressive heat of the desert isn’t making you as thirsty as you remember it did before.</p><p>Heat shivers against your arms and seeps into your dark pants. It swirls with the occasional wind and your toes dig into its eddies in the dunes. And you drag and you drag and you drag at what you puzzled out from the airbending scrolls and you <em>tug</em>.</p><p>Heat waves shimmer.</p><hr/><p>Work’s been growing scarce. Some of the traveling merchants, especially the ones with no business with the Earth Army, begin to know you by word of mouth: a nameless young man with two swords in his grip. But they have their older, more established preferences they defer to, or go out of business altogether. Detour on spirit tasks aside, your funds trickle out from between your fingers and soon you won’t be able to afford even the stalest flatbread. It will take days, but eventually your stomach and your weakening muscles will pin you down into submission.</p><p>Rin melts out of the darkness at your agreed meeting spot, coils of rope thrown over one shoulder and a small bag slung across her shoulder blades. She regards you with narrowed eyes several feet away from where you stand, with no move to come closer.</p><p>“You aren’t normal either, are you?” she asks with her hands upon the hilts of knives. “Normal people wouldn’t go looking for things that give everyone else hives to think about being near.”</p><p>“Do you have the passports?” you ask her instead of addressing her concerns.</p><p>“A weird kid having a weird name made sense, we thought,” she continues, ignoring you. “But our normal policy includes making fake names and yet this time…” Rin trails off.</p><p>You say, “I’m human.”</p><p>She laughs, once, mirthlessly. “No offence, none of us believe that.”</p><p>Under her silent judgement, you tense further until she finally pulls her hands away from her weapons and slings her bag off her back. She pulls out sheets of paper and approaches, saying, “Regardless, business is business. Spirit, human, whatever the fuck you are. Here.”</p><p>In the dim moonlight, you can’t see the script on the papers clearly, so you flick out tiny firefly sparks of flame to illuminate the words. The passport claims You is a native from a small town named Seo Dong seeking admittance into Ba Sing Se on the basis of trade connections to small time merchants under a frog deer tier contract charter. It’s not much, barely enough to keep the guards within the cities off your back and no one within the Middle Ring or higher is going to believe your paperwork. There’s an obvious typo in the lower left that no one with noble education will ever fall for.</p><p>But it’ll be enough, and you fold it away and tuck the papers away into your own bag. You ask her, “How are we getting in?”</p><p>“The walls of Ba Sing Se are old as fuck and the Earth Kingdom doesn’t maintain all the sections as well as they should. There’s a tiny segment that’s practically useless for any invading armies: getting there involves passing through marshland and bridging over a steep enough ravine to cause infantry troops trouble. And even if a couple scouts manage to make their way in, the stairs and entranceways inside the wall have all collapsed. The Earth army posts guards by the holes, but they’re easy to pay off and the collective bribes the shmucks are getting is probably greater than what the army’s paying them in the first place. So, no one’s ever fixing that segment. That’s our way in.”</p><p>Rin ducks back into the brush and trees on the side of the hill. She waves for you. “Come on, let’s get going.”</p><p>You follow her through the forest to the promised swamp as midnight crawls by. The peat sticks to your shins, hot with the heat of decomposition, and the grass stalks scratch up your fingers as you push your way through. The air surrounds you with the dense noise of what feels like every single frog on the planet croaking unceasingly. Your belongings balance safely on your head as eventually the pair of you push your way out of the bog and back onto relatively drier land.</p><p>The plants part and the clear night sky spreads its reach across the whole horizon. Uninhibited, the waxing moon gazes down upon the world. Rin waits as you unconsciously slow to a halt.</p><p>A bitter anxiety fills your mouth as you stare up and up at the walls before you. Ba Sing Se. A city of ends and defeat.</p><p>When she speaks, after the hours of mutual silence between you two, it jars you almost right out of your skin. “Come on,” she says, and turns towards the ravine below.</p><hr/><p>Perhaps it is better that Uncle Iroh never got past the walls; the smell of sewage and cooking smoke from half-rotten cabbage alone would devastatingly disappoint him. The rules of Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring come quickly within your first few days in the claustrophobia of the penned in masses. Everyone fends for themselves. No one’s getting into the higher rings. If you can’t fight, you can’t survive. Everyone’s trying to cheat everyone else out of their money. If you want to sleep somewhere at night with any measure of security and any semblance of walls against the elements, with more than a dozen square feet to your name, you need roommates.</p><p>Uh, <em>no.</em></p><p>The less you think about the fiasco of your first week in Ba Sing Se and the no less than eleven different apartments you jump in and out of and the too many people you chase away, the better. Eventually you manage to find somewhere you can live, <em>by yourself</em>, in a tiny closet of a room with barely any space for a bedroll and a sink you can creatively cook in that no one else wanted by virtue of being right above the outhouse of a tavern that honestly deserves to be completely burned down and started over again instead of attempting to clean its filth. You stuff crumpled paper into the cracked window frame to keep out as much of the stink as you can. Thankfully, you barely spend any time in your overpriced room.</p><p>Over the last year or so, thanks to all you travels on the open roads, you forget the clipped, cut off sky of mountains – or rather walls – in each cardinal direction. Just the district you arrive at overwhelms your senses; you’ve never had people crushed in so closely to your skin before, all your breath entangling everywhere you go. The streets are so narrow that any drawn cart would have trouble squeezing past the tangles of clothesline and picked over piles of trash.</p><p>The people of the Lower Ring don’t have much use for a guard standing around all day glowering at people. But in a place this dense, with this many stores by sheer necessity, nearly anyone with a working pair of sprinting legs can run deliveries.</p><p>You measure the war by the warehouses of imports. The stream of rice and grain ebbs and flows with cut lines and rerouted roads. The amount of fish decrease by the day. Wood and stone, glass and metal, crates of poultry and bundles of vegetables – you pull on your memory from past jobs and guess where the frontlines are. One morning, blood’s almost drawn fighting over who will bring twenty bolts of silk to the wall between the Middle and Lower Ring. No one had seen such fine cloth in months, even if by the standards of your childhood, the craftwork wasn’t fit for even the lowest palace servant.</p><p>So by mornings, you sprint down alleyways and across rooftops, loaded down with contraband hidden among legal produce, and memorize the fastest ways through your segment of the city. But you’d rather find more useful work that will keep you better alive in the wild if you ever leave Ba Sing Se.</p><p>There are no shortages of hungry mouths and no shortages of tiny eateries serving them half-rate food and no shortage of people looking for hands that can wield a knife and wield a sponge. At least in the kitchens you don’t have to deal with customers spilling drinks across the tables or refusing to take their parties of ten and leave after five hours of occupying one table or eat and runs trying to slip away without paying. A line cook shows you how to crack two eggs at once, one in each hand.</p><p>And finally, in the evening, after the sunset dinner rush, you drag your sore feet to a tiny clinic where you convinced the doctor inside to hire you on the basis that you could actually read all her medical texts and understand how to mix her poultices from said texts on the first attempt. You boil bandages and grind powders for her pills. In return, she pays you a coin every few days or so and looks the other way while you figure out how to dry her herbs with one hot hand pressed against stone and fewer and fewer flames on each attempt.</p><p>The work wears you out so hard every day that you gratefully sink into dreamless sleep each night, forever racing ahead of your past haunting you. Better than any meditation, your labor silences any resentments over your lost throne and the fading details of your mother’s favorite turtle ducks.</p><hr/><p>“Hey, kid,” Yingxi calls. At best, Yingxi’s a year older than you and has a pimpled face to prove it, but he calls Ahn, who is only three days younger than him, “kid” too, so clearly this is a forgone conclusion. You dodge around a giant bread board and trot over to his counter in the Green Lotus’ kitchen.</p><p>When you’re closer, he says, “You’re a colony kid aren’t you?”</p><p>“Yes,” you say, finally familiar with the lie after over a year of it pressing itself unwanted into your bones.</p><p>“Okay, listen,” he says with a lowering voice. “I promise you won’t get into any trouble over this and honestly this will just bring us more business so the boss ain’t gonna give you any grief over this. Got it, yeah?”</p><p>Confused, you slowly nod.</p><p>“Right, right, I just gotta ask ‘cause I think I’m right, but you’re a firebender aren’t you?”</p><p>“Why do you think that?” you ask in shock. You’ve never done any kind of bending in the kitchen where he can see and you’re quickly learning that the people of Ba Sing Se don’t know a whole lot about what’s going on outside its walls. Even with all the refugees flowing into the city in a steady stream, barely anyone ever talks about the outside world and its endless fighting. The rumors that trail in your wake don’t seem to make it far within the stifled air of the Earth Kingdom’s greatest city.</p><p>Yingxi grins and says, “You’re way too good at telling time. And you’re the only one who didn’t panic when that idiot Lee set his oil on fire and nearly dumped a bucket of water on it.”</p><p>Okay, shoot, this is why you’ve never spent a long time in such close quarters with so many people since landing in the Earth Kingdom. “What are you getting at?”</p><p>“All this meat,” he says and lightly smacks his hand against the slabs of seasoned red meat lined up in rows on his counter. “The hotter the flames we work with, the better it’ll cook. But we haven’t been able to get our hands on good charcoal lately and our wood stoves just aren’t hot enough for what I need. Can you help me out with that?”</p><p>He doesn’t stop you as you glance around at the bustling kitchen, where cooks focus on cracking open oysters and chop chives with a sharp <em>rat-tat-tat</em> of the knives hitting the cutting boards. Shouted orders and directions fill the steamed air and the clinks of plates washing press into the tiny cracks of quiet in the room. No one pays attention to either of you. You glance back at Yingxi and reluctantly say, “Okay.”</p><hr/><p>A fact: this war will outlive you.</p><p>In the palace, out of your own cheerful, willing ignorance, you were just as clueless about the war as the people of Ba Sing Se. Glory and might the nobles said to each other, nodding over their bloodstained profits, untouched children hidden in the folds of their sleeves. Honor and sacrifice, your mouth said as you stood up besides the smooth, wooden pieces nudged across a stretched-out map.</p><p>Shattered bones and crushed kidneys, you now know. The ribs of the hungry, the bloated stomachs of the starving, the burned off ear and the blown off finger, the torn down forests and the tsunami of rocks, the silence of the dying, the screams of the living; you were ignorant to these self-inflicted injuries of a nation digging deeper into the gangrene of its wounds with skinless fingers, mixing blood into its dirt, salting its own earth.</p><p>Where’s the glory in a world that knows a hundred ways to kill for every way to sing? Where’s the might in an empire of fear without any love to sweeten the poison? Where’s the honor in a nation feeding its young men and women to the slaughter? Who would be there, left caked in ash, to repair the gutted roofs and the rotten foundations? If the Fire Nation murders its way across the globe, who will be there to build its roads and feed its fires? There will be no one left to give offerings to your weeping ancestors.</p><p>You family has blinded itself and drags your people into the dark with them.</p><p>And what can you do? All your treachery has gifted you is the flame in your nameless hand, barely bright enough to reflect off every fang in the snarling mouth grown from the burning throne, tearing you and your people into shreds.</p><p>How can this war possibly ever end?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Have you ever heard a fox screaming at 3 a.m. outside your window before?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>Something in the Spirit World must be changing.</i>
</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Zuko doesn’t have parents to stage a teenage rebellion against anymore so he tries making do with the spirits. </p><p>Also, I completely underestimated how long outline points would stretch out into back when I split this giant oneshot into multiple chapters, so we have at least one extra chapter now.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Winter comes for Ba Sing Se and you hope no one looks too hard at the fact that you never buy a bag of coal or firewood along with the women and children huddled in ratty shawls and coats standing in long lines at the stores. The lines aren’t as bad as the lines at the butchers for a tiny parcel of fat, but bad enough that you see no point in standing outside in the cold for something you don’t need.</p><p>Instead, you spend your few waking hours in your apartment with your cupped hands in your lap, thumbs brushing against an invisible heat expanding and contracting in your palms.</p><p>You – you don’t let yourself think. Too many things you don’t let yourself think: your fists and your muted anger, the faint feel of silk rubbed between your fingers, the beat and cadence of an opera seen from the royal family’s reserved and fortified box. The feather soft whisps of hair curled at your sister’s nape, the first time Mai drew kohl around her eyes, the headstands and flips you watch Ty Tee teach Azula and you copy on your own in the illusionary privacy of your room. A cool hand against your forehead as you sweat out a fever.</p><p>Inexplicably, Lu Ten’s ghosts fold themselves into the alleyways and against the creaking stairs of Ba Sing Se. Uncle Iroh spent a couple years hunting the Spirit World for his son. He came back empty-handed with failure pinned upon his breast. And perhaps, in the end, it had been because he was always looking in the wrong places, forever bared from one of the last strongholds in the human world against the Fire Nation’s ravenous beast called war.</p><p>You see Lu Ten in the legless young man only so many years your senior that spends each dawn carefully seated on a threadbare, flimsily cushioned chair by the front door down the block from your apartment. A block further along your path, someone’s stubbornly growing trays of catnip and great flocks of pygmy-pumas and possum cats and the occasional owlcat loll in a crowd of purring and blissful stupor. Your cousin dotted on the palace mousers, petting their heads and chasing them down in the spring with fine-toothed combs. Once, while the parents were all preoccupied with something involving your grandfather, he pulled you and Azula aside into a servant passage where in a corner a new litter of kittens curled blindly against the warmth of their mother.</p><p>On one morning, you jostle your way through the courier crowd with more force than normal, for the parcel of lotus seeds heading towards the wall around the Middle Ring; Lu Ten loved lotus paste the best of all cake fillings.</p><p>Did your mother join him, the night she disappeared and bade you make a promise you would only break?</p><p>Would they recognize you now, wrist deep in gutting several dozen fish barely as long as your hand? Would Azula? Would Mai?</p><hr/><p>Doctor Mihuang takes one look at you and sets aside her scroll to beckon you over, “Come here.”</p><p>Rolling your right shoulder, you walk over. She kicks a stool out and directs you, “Sit.”</p><p>Awkwardly, you set down a bag of leftovers a customer tried throwing at one of the waiters at the Green Lotus and that Ahn scooped almost straight out of the air when he went to investigate the commotion and handed off to you.</p><p>“You must stretch better,” she reprimands. “Stiffness grows from improper flow of your spirit and blood. A young man like you shouldn’t get so many knots.”</p><p>You wince as she pointedly jabs a thumb against a tense point to the right of your spine. “I’ll stretch more,” you promise.</p><p>She only harrumphs and keeps kneading.</p><p>Eventually, she lets you go and directs you back to sharpening her needles and knives beside her in a rare lull without patients. The neighborhood gangs evidently aren’t fighting as much at the moment. You set each needle to the side for her inspection until Doctor Mihuang finally sends you packing with deliveries to drop off and late payments to demand.</p><p>One such reluctant payer answers the door with pleas for more patience. “As soon as the new year’s celebrations are over, I’ll repay the good doctor,” the haggard man begs. You can hear a baby in the chaotically messy room behind him, screaming more than crying.</p><p>He explains, “The extra business during the celebrations will give us enough to pay. Please, have mercy with us. My sister and her child are too sickly.”</p><p>“How long after the festivals?” you ask, squinting.</p><p>His fingers writhe in an anxious tangle. The screaming continues, this time with additional banging on the walls from what sounds like an irate neighbor. He says, “The third week of the new month. Please, I <em>promise</em>.”</p><p>“Okay,” you allow, though still frowning. “But if over a week passes after the celebrations are done and we still haven’t heard from you, we’re going to come looking.”</p><p>“Thank you, thank you,” the man gasps and bows.</p><p>You leave, distinctly uncomfortable and with the beginning of a headache.</p><hr/><p>“Does it snow in Ba Sing Se?” you ask Yingxi.</p><p>He checks on the bao in the boiling pot before answering you. “Not a lot. The heaviest snows usually come about a month after the new year. But even when they do, in this bit of the city you don’t need to worry about it that much.”</p><p>You pass him a clean plate and get back to cutting up carrots. “Why not?”</p><p>“There’s a waterbender that does a pretty decent job of cleaning out the streets. ‘S why we don’t deal with a lot of ice ‘round here too on roads after it rains.” He begins plating the bao.</p><p>Surprised, you ask, “A waterbender?” You’ve never met one before and frankly, you certainly hadn’t thought you could find one in the Earth Kingdom’s largest city.</p><p>But Yingxi only shrugs. “Not much of one,” he admits. “Got some grandparents who came over from the tribes and the ability diluted over the generations. Has enough control to pull water out of a well and push snow out of the way, but that’s ‘bout it. Hey, take this to the waiter, will ya, kid?”</p><p>When you return from carting off the dish, he moves on from the topic and the pot of soup. Cutting parsley at a lightning pace, he says without glancing up, “By the by, I know you got other work in the mornings, but mind helping us out instead during the new year’s? Ahn’s gonna need way more people mixing fillings and pounding mochi if we have any chance of keepin’ up with business. You understand me, kid?”</p><p>“I’ve never pounded mochi before,” you warn.</p><p>Yingxi dumps the parsley into a wok of already sizzling chicken pork and garlic. He says, “Mochi ain’t the only thing you can help with.”</p><p>“Like what?”</p><p>“Fish prep, oysters, scorpion goose plucking, kneading dough – I know you can do at least that. Plenty o’ stuff.”</p><p>It’s not like the warehouses have set employees. You come, you might get a job. You don’t come, someone else gets a job.</p><p>“I’ll think about it,” you tell him and move on to the potatoes.</p><hr/><p>You can’t say you missed the new year’s festivals as experienced by the Fire Nation royal family. Sure, you had the best view in the city of the fireworks at night, but by day, it was rite after rite and carefully choreographed ceremonies for almost all fifteen days. The whole affair only grew more intolerable once you became crown prince.</p><p>In the Lower Ring, there isn’t nearly as much ceremony. Instead, there are flashes of excitement like when a giant pile of black-market gunpowder stockpiled for illicit firecrackers nearly goes up in an explosive mushroom cloud. Or the one afternoon where Doctor Mihuang slaps a red envelope in your hand and tells you to not get too drunk.</p><p>You weren’t planning on drinking anyways, and especially not when the obviously higher ring men silently descend on the rooftops of the Lower Ring in force.</p><p>“Hey, Ahn, what’s with all the men on the roofs? They aren’t the guardsmen but look like they have some kind of uniform,” you say while rolling out what feels like the thousandth dumpling skin that day.</p><p>He leans against his giant mallet and frowns while wiping a hand against his brow. “Guys on the <em>roofs</em>?”</p><p>You reach for another dough ball. Why are they making you roll these out? You don’t have nearly Yingxi or any of the cooks’ skill in speed or uniformity with this task. “Cone hats?” you prompt. “Dark gloves? On the roofs?”</p><p>He stares harder. “The <em>Dai Li?</em>”</p><p>“Who the hell are the Dai Li,” you angrily mutter over the clacking of your rolling pin.</p><p>“How did you – never mind, you obviously didn’t tick any of them off if you’re still here. If you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you.” Ahn shakes his head and returns to pounding.</p><p>Using a line like that, whoever the Dai Li are, they sound like a bunch of thugs. No surprise that even the higher rings have gangs. And you can take on a bunch of thugs, higher rings or not. More importantly, sounds like you can go back to running on the roofs and practicing your sword forms up there again. Your apartment is far too cramped to achieve anything. This time, you won’t almost fall off a building in surprise.</p><p>Higher ring probably criminals aside, you sort of awkwardly slide your way through the festivals. Looming over everything is the fact that you don’t have any family to celebrate with, nor do you particularly want to ever see said family again. The only way you’d see them face to face in the future is because you’re already well through the proceedings of your impending imprisonment or summary execution.</p><p>So, no families.</p><p>Adding to your embarrassment is that Yingxi’s role as the eldest of nine siblings is exceedingly obvious and he’s decided to drag you right into the middle of <em>his</em> family’s celebrations. His mother takes your sudden presence in her living space completely in stride and shoos you back to the dining table every time you try getting up and helping out with at least <em>something</em>, even if it’s just grabbing an extra set of plates.</p><p>“Why am I here,” you ask semi-desperately for the seventh time as a hoard of children run screaming into the courtyard for firecrackers.</p><p>Yingxi only slaps you on the back a few times and beamingly tells you, “As if I could let ya spend all week brooding in your depressing apartment by yourself.”</p><p>“My apartment is not depressing,” you say, which he ignores.</p><hr/><p>You’ve been bracing yourself for their arrival again, like the bad smell a couple streets over that keeps returning. Only by a feat of immense control and willpower you do not throw your chopsticks at the fox’s head when it appears out of thin air. It leers knowingly at you and yips. It’s not the endlessly laughing fox, but they’re all bastards and that’s not much comfort.</p><p>Disturbingly, the spirit messenger seems <em>distracted</em> this time, a tail flicking onto and off of its paws repeatedly.</p><p>“Please tell me the earth item is in Ba Sing Se,” you tell it as you set aside your bowl of noodles.</p><p>The fox leaps across your room and almost into your lap to sniff at the bowl. You warily watch the tails. The taste of fur took hours to get out of your mouth last time.</p><p>“Yes,” it says then sneezes directly into your food after taking what’s evidently too large a whiff of the spices. Even though you know it’s useless, you try shoving it away. Not a single hair budges.</p><p>“Tell me what I’m looking for, <em>directly</em> this time. Ba Sing Se’s a big place. If you won’t want me spending months looking, then tell me what to look for and where directly,” you demand.</p><p>The fox sneezes again. “No, yes,” it says. “No, no,” it goes and begins pacing in a circle. Its tails slap against the floor and three of its shining eyes narrow and blink closed.</p><p>“The task for You has changed,” it says to your alarm. “What is coming is coming, what has come has come. We must welcome the Moon as it rises with the resurgent winds.”</p><p>It turns in a circle again and instead of looking at you, stares at one of your walls at an angle. You glance over too, but all you see are the stains a previous tenant left on the cracking paint. Beads of apprehension clink into a growing pile along the ridges of your spine as you watch the fox, more subdued and somber than you’ve ever seen one of them yet.</p><p>“Am I looking for something involving the moon?” you ask.</p><p>“<em>No</em>,” it quickly snaps. You flinch back at the sudden baring of two rows of teeth. Its raised fur flattens out and its black lips close back over its fangs. “No,” the spirit messenger says again, colder. “Not yet. In what those humans call a university, we seek a set of goods. A ten-piece set of lacquer serving trays. Once You lets us into the guarded room, We will take matters from there.”</p><p>Okay, you asked for more clear directions, but now you’re only extremely disturbed. You repeat, “A ten-piece set of lacquer serving trays at the city’s university.”</p><p>“Yes,” the great fox confirms and finally turns all of its blazing eyes upon you, the light in its fur shimmering through unnamed colors that draw involuntary tears to your eyes. “Yes, and <em>swiftly</em>.”</p><hr/><p>Thoroughly pushed off-kilter, you set off for the Middle Ring the very next night. Between the late hour, the extra money you tucked into your shirt, and Rin’s passable work on your passport, the guards at the checkpoint on the wall between the Lower and Middle Ring let you through without too much fuss.</p><p>They should have, since there’s no hiding that the long package tucked under one black clad arm’s definitely your swords and no one dressed in all black in the middle of the night can be up to much good. But the guard takes the money you saved by virtue of barely needing to eat or buy firewood with a lackadaisical shrug before turning back to her novel. </p><p>From the train station, locating the university doesn’t take much longer. Forced off the nowhere near as densely packed roofs of the Middle Ring compared to the Lower Ring, you slip through the shadows and darkness, mask fixed upon your face when no one watches. You focus all your attention on stealthily traveling through the streets and trees instead of turning the thoughts over and over in your head, like a gemstone polishing in a tumbler, of what set the spirits so on edge.</p><p>Something in the Spirit World must be changing.</p><p>The denizens of the Middle Ring retire for the night earlier than in the Lower Ring. The thin light of the waning moon, a slimming crescent in the sky, guides your silent steps. Only the owlcats and a few miscellaneous animals make a sound in the cold night. Your mask blocks the damp cloud of your breath.</p><p>As you scale the low walls of the university’s campus – after a dash launches you halfway to the top and your fingers dig into minute cracks in the long ago bent smooth surface – you hear the soft tune of a scholar practicing at their instrument. You still at the top, flattened against the clay tiles in the shade of a tree growing by the wall within the university’s grounds, and listen. The notes of what sounds like a koto trill through the night.</p><p>You hadn’t thought about music in years. Your mother and uncle agreed on the traditions of musical studies: no gentleman or lady, especially a prince or princess, could go without learning. Even your father, only once, grudgingly played the sho for you and Azula.</p><p>Your mother used the same eight bone picks she had as a girl, long before she married your father. And she’d slip them on as you sat at her side, her koto’s dark wood gleaming in the fire’s light, and she’d pluck out the songs from the new opera in season, memorized by ear from only one sitting. Azula, ever your father’s daughter, hadn’t enjoyed the lessons. When Lu Ten died, with your uncle outside the palace more often than not and your mother completely gone, your lessons petered off too.</p><p>Hopefully what you are hearing is only the acoustics of the walls and the stone gardens warping the sound of the far-off plucking and not that the poor fool has all their strings off tune.</p><p>You continue listening as you take in the lay of the grounds and map out where less protected side doors are probably positioned. But while you lay plastered on the green shingles, the smallest fox you’ve encountered yet materializes inches from your nose with a silent thump.</p><p>“Follow,” it instructs and flings itself off the wall with all the speed and bruising impact of a stone launched from a slingshot.</p><p>You officially cross into the territory of <em>extremely</em> concerned.</p><p>Scrambling into the tree and then swinging your way back to the ground, you chase after its petite form before you lose it in the night or someone patrolling or wandering the paths runs across a trespassing spirit fox. It gallops along the wall, then veers straight at the nearest building and passes through the plaster and brick wall without stumbling a single step.</p><p>You silently curse and sprint for the nearest door. Its lock doesn’t survive a heavy blow from the pommel of one of your swords and thankfully the university keeps its hinges oiled. The entrance leads into a dark hallway. Making an estimate at where the fox ricocheted into the building, you turn right at the first intersection.</p><p>Several dozen meters down this path, the spirit leaps out of thin air and nips your left arm. It nimbly twists out of the way from your swat and harries off down the hall the way you came. Fuming in silence, you turn about face and follow.</p><p>Down and down silent halls you go, the faint music from outside blocked off by the walls and pillars. You run past closed doors and extinguished torches, with glimpses of courtyards at even intervals through panel walls left open to the cold. Just when you start suspecting the fox <em>doesn’t </em>know the way to its quarry, the two of you pull into what must be the main building.</p><p>Lion dogs glare from the walls, paws on giant stone balls. The ceiling rises into shadows high above your head. Unbidden, you slow your pace and stare openly at carved owls. Polished marble glimmers beneath your feet. How long has it been since you’ve seen fine culture? Since you’ve been in a building with actual history and might built into its foundation stones? Since you’ve been in something that actually meant something, a monument to greatness and pride with an army of caretakers attending to the gentlemen and ladies studying inside, sharing poetry and discussing polemics? Since you watched refined women dance and dignified men toast?</p><p>This time the fox bites you on your calf.</p><p>You unwillingly trail after it out of the great atrium, into one of the hallways splitting off from the grand hall, and back into a maze of twists and turns. Finally, it leads you to a giant set of doors it dances in front of, antsy. You set your hand upon the metal rivets and <em>feel</em> – you refuse to examine <em>how</em> – why the spirits can’t get through on their own. It vibrates vaguely, a dead and leaden reverberation of <em>keep away</em>, <em>keep away</em>, <em>keep away</em>. The fox crawls onto your shoulders as you crouch down to inspect the door handles.</p><p>Whatever talismans bar the way in, you don’t see any evidence of on the door’s surface, or on the doorframe. The protections can easily be on the inside, shutting out the outside, but you set your palm against the cold surface again and no, you don’t think that’s what the architects and craftsmen did. The talismans and sigils are <em>inside</em> the door, threaded through metal and stone by benders in precise lines and angles. Disrupting their workings would take blowing a hole through the door itself, which you don’t remotely have the capabilities for. You stand back up.</p><p>The doorknob under your pressing hand stays stubbornly still. “Is there another way in?” you ask the fox curling up on your left shoulder, annoyingly right where you can’t see it well in your greatly diminished peripheral vision.</p><p>“No,” it quietly sulks and makes itself home.</p><p>“Then there must be a key for the door somewhere,” you reason and take a step back.</p><p>The fox nips at your hair behind your ear. “No. This way is faster.”</p><p>“…But it’s locked,” you say.</p><p>“Locked against human thieves, yes. Locked against spirit thieves, yes. Locked against You?” It laughs.</p><p>“What do you mean?” you hiss, but it only keeps chuckling in a register far too low for its tiny body.</p><p>Fine. So, the doors’ spells apparently don’t work on <em>you</em> specifically. You determinately chuck all of <em>those</em> worrying implications aside for another day when you’re not in the middle of robbing a wealthy university blind. Laying both your hands against the smooth surface, you close your eyes and concentrate on the thrum of <em>stay out</em>, <em>stay out</em>, <em>stay out</em> again.</p><p>It shudders under your palms with the weight of mountains pressing down on themselves, of limestone worn away into the sea, of basalt rising through the inflamed throat of volcanoes, of pebbles ground smooth in a dried-out riverbed. It trembles with the grass overtaking an ancient mountain side, with the miner chipping into a vein of gemstones, with the convulsive rise of new stone as the earth shakes and shakes.</p><p>In the beginning there was stone, in the beginning there was fire, in the beginning there was air, in the beginning there was water. There was the earth, churning back into the fire; the fire, gasping at the air; the air, heaving into the water; the water, spilling into the earth. There is the heat, the bone grinding pressure, of the mountain, of the lava, of the magma, of the –</p><p><em>There</em>.</p><p>The doors click open under your hands. Your slumped body nearly drops onto the floor as you blink back into awareness and realize that the slowly opening doors will no longer support your weight.</p><p>The fox kicks off your shoulder into a soundless gallery, suspiciously empty of people. Your whole path so far has been suspiciously free of detection and you whisper at the fox scrambling onto a carved table, “Where is everyone?”</p><p>“Gone,” it says simply, and leaps from the table onto a bookshelf.</p><p>Terrifying suggestions aside, you decide to ignore the fox as it searches through the exhibits like a maniacal flying lemur in favor of taking in the scroll paintings hung upon the walls. They paint faces differently in the Earth Kingdom compared to the Fire Nation. You’re no expert, but the colors are different too, something softer and more diffuse. Definitely more mountains.</p><p>Almost on the completely other side of the room, the fox yips. You leave aside your gazing and trot over.</p><p>The university will definitely call for your arrest when the spirits are well and done.</p><p>If someone came and told you that these trays were fit for an Earth Kingdom king or queen of old, you’d accept their claim without any contestation. Each tray propped up upon the column of shelves bear unique scenes carved into their dark red and black lacquer. Gentlemen play flutes besides misty lakes as herons take flight in the sky, each tail feather carved in intricate detail. A single butterfly rests daintily upon a riot of blooming flowers and twisting leaves, upon thin veins and among smooth stems. A pair of monkeys chase each other through a field of shuddering bamboo stalks alongside the whistling wind.</p><p>“How are you taking these with you?” you ask as you size up each several foot-wide tray.</p><p>Instead of answering, the tiny fox sneezes and sneezes again, and then its mouth splits open and open and open until rows of white teeth gleam all the way down its neck, almost to its chest. With one determined gulp, an entire tray larger than its body disappears into the wet maw. You take a startled step back.</p><p>“What the fuck,” your mouth almost says, just for emphasis, but instead it hangs open, slack jawed, as the fox bounds up the shelves, repeating the process for the other nine pieces.</p><p>It turns to you. Instinctually, you raise your swords, sheathed just a second ago, pointed at the threat before you.</p><p>You retreat two steps back for every step it advances upon you, but that’s not enough space to stop it when it lunges and swallows and –</p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="small">the sun rises.</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small">where? where is he?</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small">where is the might he promised? where is the glory and the valor? where is his pride? where is his honor?</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small">where has it all gone?</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small"><em>over there</em>, points the ashen robe.</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small"><em>over here</em>, points the crushed bone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="small"><em>over, it’s done</em>, says the drowned lung.</span>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p>“Where were you yesterday, kid?” Yingxi asks at the back entrance into the Green Lotus’ kitchens where he stops you from entering.</p><p>“Sick,” you lie.</p><p>He peers at the bags you can feel under your eyes. His noses scrunches up. But even as he mutters, “You look like you’re <em>still</em> sick, kid,” he lets you stumble in.</p><hr/><p>Grand theft of world-known educational institutions aside, your life in Ba Sing Se plods on monotonously. The management of the Green Lotus decides your additional hours spent in its kitchens during the two weeks of the new year’s holidays weren’t a complete failure, so you stop running courier jobs in the morning in favor of Ahn metaphorically beating the knowledge of how to passably cook into your brain. Doctor Mihuang promotes you to attending upon the easiest cuts and injuries on her patients while she watches your bedside manner like a hawk on the hunt. Your apartment continues being little more than an inglorious closet.</p><p>As promised, it snows, though you don’t meet the local half-rate waterbender. The snow melts away within a couple weeks. The weather begins to warm. You work in the kitchens; you learn under Doctor Mihuang’s long suffering treatment of the local tattooed gang members. You don’t hear any news of Ba Sing Se’s authorities hunting for you.</p><p>You almost completely miss the day when you realize you’ve been in the Earth Kingdom for over two years.</p><hr/><p>The year passes.</p><p>Yingxi steals for you a tiny plate of diced crab and cabbage spiced with pepper flakes rolled tight in translucent rice sheet wrappers that have gone cold now and are honestly slightly slimy to the touch from the congealing layer of oil. You dunk each roll almost full-bodied into the soy sauce and savor each bite for as long as you can.</p><p>“I think I’m in heaven,” you mutter around a mouthful and snatch up another roll.</p><hr/><p>You come home after fending off Yingxi’s nagging about your eating habits to find what looks like a cross between a giant caterpillar, an antelope, and a lizard taking up almost all the space in your apartment. There’s barely any room for you to stand after you close the door behind you.</p><p>“What are you here for?” you ask. Please don’t let anyone try looking through your grimy window right now.</p><p>It unfolds itself with the cracking of carapace. Its flattened face says, “<em>Booouuuntifuuul neeeews. Boooouuuuuuntifuuuuul neeeeeews! The Aaaaaaavatar. The Aaaaaaaaaavatar!</em>”</p><p>It lurches towards you.</p><p>This is why it’s a <em>stupid idea</em> to leave your swords propped up against your wall, instead of constantly strapped to your sides or your back, <em>Ahn</em>. You push it and its moist and slightly rotten breath out of your face with an incessant wall of heat.</p><p>“The Avatar’s been gone for a hundred years,” you bark and keep pushing its mass back as much as you can.</p><p>“<em>Heeeeeee reeetuuuuurrns. Heeeeeeeeeeeee reeetuuuuuuuuuuurns! Joooyouuuuus. Joooooyooooouuuuuuuuus!</em>”</p><p>That grinds you to a halt.</p><p>“What?” you choke out.</p><p>The spirit writhes in a way that ingulfs you with nausea. There’s no way for you to read the expression on its face, if its face is capable of expressions in the first place, but if you had to pick something – rapturous. It looks rapturous.</p><p>You are so, <em>so</em> direly uncomfortable. “Okay, the Avatar is back, great for him! What this has to do with me, I don’t know, but thank you <em>so much</em> for the news and now you can get out of here! Get out, <em>get out!</em>”</p><p>The spirit carries on as if it doesn’t hear you, shaking and swaying and, to your horror, moaning. For your own sanity, you block all ability to comprehend what it’s saying. Can you set it on fire? Please, can you set it on fire?</p><p>But rather than set your whole blighted building on fire and destroy all the clothing flapping in the minutely chilling wind outside, you keep pressing it with spears of heat, until it finally receives the message that its presence and services are no longer needed and it flows out of your window like wet slime. The wind blows orange leaves in through the shattered window frame.</p><p>You stare into the bands of color of the swiftly falling sunset outside.</p><p>Great. The Avatar is back. Good for him.</p><hr/><p>About a month and a half later, the spirits kidnap you in the middle of your nonexistent lunch break. One instant you’re minding your own business, sprinting through the confusing streets of Ba Sing Se you’ve finally untangled, back to the restaurant with a twenty-pound parcel of tofu Ahn sent you out to buy. The next, you’re tumbling ass over kettle on moss covered stone, scratching up your arms protectively covering your head, and rolling onto your feet, wildly looking about.</p><p>“We told you that the Avatar had returned in the west,” a being in the guise of a woman drenched in red crossly says at you.</p><p>Still caught up in your indignation, you say back to her without thinking, “It’s the Avatar. What business does the Avatar and I have with each other?”</p><p>The red swells. Roiling blood asks, “Do you not have a debt?”</p><p>“This isn’t one of my jobs,” you angrily say. “I only have a Water Tribe artifact to recover. That is <em>not</em> the Avatar.”</p><p>Lights flicker in the red, like sparks of lightning. A smell of rotten cherries begins to spread. The spirit says, “Consider this an extraordinary act of meddling. Have you enjoyed your increased strength? Your heightened awareness and deepened stealth? Your increased fortune in finding food the more your borrowed name spreads?</p><p>“Do you know what will happen to you – you who have eaten from a spirit and given yourself to a spirit – if the Fire Nation does what it wishes with a captive Avatar? The balance of the worlds will unravel and You, stitched over the seams between worlds, will unravel first.”</p><p>You consider this in silence for a handful of a bird’s heartbeats. “Why do the spirits care about the life of one mortal?” you demand.</p><p>That’s definitely lightning crackling in the red haze barely masquerading as a humanoid. “You have parts of spirits’ one. Spirits have parts of your one. Your unraveling unravels more than just You.”</p><p>“The Blue Spirit,” you realize. “This isn’t about me; this is about the Blue Spirit.”</p><p>“<em>Do you not wield their name?</em>”</p><p>With the smell of burning gas, the landscape tears past at a frantic, stomach-churning pace. The red seethes, “We cannot take their name back yet. Do not lose it.”</p><p>Your skin feels like it’s coming off in sheets, your eyes burn, and you can barely move your head against the pressure pushing it – pushing your whole body – back. Your blood shivers and shakes and thrashes, outside of your control. A gasp splatters against your ribs.</p><p>And in another instant, you’re heaving on the ground, swords at your side, bag on your clammy back, mask digging into your spleen.</p><p>You cannot wait for the day you’re free of these debts you did not consciously consent to.</p><hr/><p>You stagger into the town the spirits dumped you on the edge of. Once in town proper, you learn several pressing matters:</p><p>You’re back in Fire Nation territory. Deeply back in Fire Nation contested territory. So deep, in fact, you’re in the town servicing the Pohuai Stronghold.</p><p>Some navy commander has the Avatar held captured in said stronghold.</p><p>The spiteful animosity between you and the spirits is absolutely mutual.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Some notes:</p><p>1. What Zuko heard while he was robbing the hell out of BSSU is a gayageum, not a koto. Functionally similar though.<br/>2. Somewhere in this chapter, Zuko receives a proper sex education. The why, who, and how are ambiguous until I figure out the funniest set of circumstances for this little fact.<br/>3. Iroh’s life would be a <i>lot</i> easier if Zuko didn’t spend about a year in BSS.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>Instead of packing the Avatar onto a ship and hightailing it towards Boiling Rock, or trotting him along to an execution ground post haste, the commander is making a dramatic speech that even the most amateur theater troupe would trash.</i>
</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I finally justify all the character tags.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Technically, you can ignore this entire situation. It’s the Avatar, he’s somehow managed to evade detection for a hundred years. A little jailbreaking can’t be outside his skill set.</p><p>But …</p><p>First of all, he must be over a hundred years old by now, if it’s still the same Avatar who cycled into the Air Nomads before your great-grandfather had them all murdered. A hundred isn’t too hard for powerful benders, which the Avatar absolutely is, but a hundred still makes a jailbreak out of <em>Pohuai Stronghold</em> more difficult than healthy. If he cracks his head and dies trying to escape the Yuyan Archers, that will be a really sorry end.</p><p>Second of all, the spirits have flung you <em>far</em> too deep into Fire Nation territory for you to have any solid hope of absconding back into Earth Kingdom land without detection. With your luck, there’s no doubt a patrol will catch you if you strike out on your own, as galling as the fact stands.</p><p>With some help from someone, like say, <em>the Avatar</em>, your chances of surviving the next month shoot up.</p><p>You glance back up at the afternoon sky.</p><p>Damn it, alright.</p><hr/><p>Instead of packing the Avatar onto a ship and hightailing it towards Boiling Rock, or trotting him along to an execution ground post haste, the commander is … The idiot’s making a dramatic speech that even the most amateur theater troupe would trash. Is this the quality the Fire Nation dedicates towards apprehending one of the greatest threats to its power? Whatever, his loss is your gain.</p><p>His loss is more than just your gain. The guard rotation for entering into the fort itself and then through the inner grounds into the main tower are on a skeleton crew. Almost the entire garrison is conveniently distracted with the commander’s shoddy speechmaking skills while you beat it up the tower’s stairs as fast as you can. You’ve robbed criminal headquarters with more coordinated defenses.</p><p>This <em>can’t</em> be this easy.</p><p>You do meet resistance within the tower. But the Earth Kingdom already knows that the Blue Spirit is a firebender and you’re already banished for life on sort of treason charges from the Fire Nation, so there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from charging the fortress with all your newest tricks.</p><p>Men scatter in your wake as you lash out with steel, flames, and heat.</p><p>Faintly, you can still hear the commander’s droning and the troops’ mandatory cheering. The glory of the nation, he says through the metal and the stone. With the city of Ba Sing Se razed to the ground, with the Earth Kingdom cut down to its knees, with the Water Tribes burned, with the Avatar captured – the might of the Fire Nation will rise like the eternal sun, an inferno that never sets.</p><p>“Glory to our nation, our lords, and our ladies,” you mutter bitterly after leaping past the slumped body of a soldier you kicked into a wall. They really could burn Ba Sing Se to the ground. You wish you couldn’t believe it of your people, of their orders.</p><p>But you’ve seen the gutted remains of towns in the path of the Fire Nation’s army, like trapped prey. The men and women of the Earth Kingdom’s Midwest crafted a special word of hate for the 35<sup>th</sup> Division and the bloodlust of its new commanders, instated by the new reign.</p><p>You climb the stairs, away from another useless floor.</p><p>Finally, at the fifteenth floor, you take out four men standing guard before a locked door. You can’t hear the speech outside anymore.</p><p>You unlock the door.</p><p>The Avatar is definitely not over a hundred.</p><hr/><p>Somehow amid the chaos of you and the Avatar breaking out of the fortress, you pick up the name of the commander howling for the soldiers to capture the Avatar alive and to kill the traitor immediately. Far too many arrows come too close to call; without constant blasts of air and fire, you’d be a pincushion.</p><p>You press the name of the commander into your memory: Zhao.</p><p>Fuck Zhao.</p><p>The two of you book it the instant you clear the gate. A hail of arrows rain down after the literal tornado you’re dragged into.</p><hr/><p>After you retrieve your bag from the tree you hid it in, the Avatar – “Call me Aang! What’s your name?” – leads you into a swamp. He shoves his hands into the frigid and murky water, rooting around until he stands up with several frozen frogs in his grip. He still hasn’t explained what the frogs are for.</p><p>“Come on, it’s not that far from here,” he says.</p><p>The instant you step out of the freezing mud, you dry out your pants and shoes with a wave of heat.</p><p>“Neat trick,” he says. “But these frogs need to stay frozen. My friends are sick, and they need them.” A gust of wind shucks the mud off his clothing.</p><p>Aang, you discover, is a bit of a chatterbox. As you follow him up the paths on the old hills beyond the swamp towards a cluster of ruins visible in the dim moonlight now and then, he says, “Thanks for saving me. That was a tight situation, and my friends are <em>really</em> sick. I’ve already been away too long. I’m sure you don’t have to, but thanks for sticking with me still.”</p><p>Unsure what to say in the face of his naked worry and gratitude, you settle on, “You’re welcome,” and otherwise stay silent. You’re supposed to be helping Doctor Mihuang close up her clinic around now. This day isn’t going anywhere you expected it to when you woke up this morning.</p><p>Then you watch the Avatar stuff a frog into the mouth of a delirious boy. You put your face, mask and all, into your hands so you don’t see him do the same for the equally feverish girl. Why didn’t you just eat that damn apple all the way back at that dilapidated shrine?</p><hr/><p>The transition from feverish mumbling to disgusted spitting doesn’t take nearly as long as you expected it to.</p><p>“So, Aang, who’s this?” the presumably Water Tribe boy asks. His ponytail’s mused and skewed thanks to his dried fever sweat.</p><p>“Oh, well, this is the Blue Spirit! He helped me break out of a Fire Nation fortress,” Aang blithely says.</p><p>The girl calls water out of a bowl filled earlier by a sheepish Aang and splashes it over her face. Confirming that she is, in fact, alert and heard correctly, she says with an edge of panicked concern, “Aang, why were you at a Fire Nation fortress?”</p><p>“An herbalist told me to find some frozen frogs and then suddenly there were all these archers and nets. And then it turned out that Zhao caught up to us again and he had me in the fortress and right when I thought I was a goner, the Blue Spirit suddenly appeared. But I’m not captured anymore and you’ll all better now, so it’s all good!”</p><p>… You suppose an airbender would have an impressive lung capacity.</p><p>“Zhao again? Why couldn’t you bust out of there by yourself? No offense, but Commander Sideburns doesn’t have any track record in holding you captured.”</p><p>“It’s the Pohuai Stronghold,” you supply unnecessarily. “It’s one of the Fire Nations’ most secure locations.”</p><p>“He speaks!” the boy shouts, pointing at you. He cannot see the glare you send him.</p><p>The girl, the waterbender, an actually skilled waterbender, refills her canteens with flicks of her fingers. She smiles gratefully towards you, if still haggard from the fever. “Thank you for helping Aang.”</p><p>“I head what was happening, that’s all,” you say, increasingly uncomfortable with her easy gratitude.</p><p>“So why don’t you take off the mask?” the boy – you really need to get their names – asks.</p><p>Aang stiffens, as if suddenly remembering certain pressing details, like all the flames as the fighting grew progressively messier. Like how the air wavers and hisses around you. He glances at you, likely guessing – correctly – at what allegiance the features of your face will claim.</p><p>“Well?”</p><p>“I’m thinking,” you stall. “Tell me your names first?”</p><p>The girl jumps in. “I’m Katara. This is my brother, Sokka. We’re from the Southern Water Tribe.”</p><p>“Long way from home,” you murmur distractedly, more focused on this <em>new</em> trap the spirits flung you into. After the excitement of the last many hours, the Fire Nation’s going to be on high alert for dual sword wielding firebenders wearing a Blue Spirit mask. They’ll link you to your activities in the Earth Kingdom quickly enough. But you can’t slip your mask to the bottom of your bag the same way as you did in the Earth Kingdom. Your scar will instantly land you in prison or worse, rather than just being an unfortunate curiosity. And this deep in Fire Nation territory? Several weeks’ walk from the frontlines as they were several months ago and no telling of how far the Fire Nation advanced while you were stuck in Ba Sing Se’s news vacuum? Your luck will turn you in.</p><p>“If you’re not comfortable taking your mask off, you don’t have to,” Katara assures you, overriding her brother’s squawking.</p><p>“That’s not quite the problem,” you tell her. Another wave of exhaustion passes over you; it’s been so long since you had a decent night’s sleep. You haven’t done anything as strenuous as <em>storming Pohuai Stronghold</em> in months. You ask them, “Why are you traveling through Fire Nation territory? Wouldn’t it be safer to stay in the eastern half of the continent?”</p><p>Sokka answers, “It’s the fastest route to the North Pole.”</p><p>“Katara and I are learning waterbending there,” Aang pipes up.</p><p>Well, that would certainly safely deliver you out of Fire Nation chains straight into the hands of another enemy. And everything north on the way to the pole’s under Fire Nation control as well.</p><p>You can’t trust these three, but you’re tired and you can trust everyone else for hundreds of miles around even less. There are no options: you have to escape this territory, and this isn’t something you can manage on your own. “Okay,” you say, bleary and with cotton swiftly taking over your mind. “First, can I get your word that I can travel with you out of Fire Nation territory? Preferably back to Earth Kingdom land eventually, but that’s less important.”</p><p>“What’s in it for us?” Sokka asks, rightly suspicious.</p><p>You glance towards the Avatar – who apparently still hasn’t learned waterbending or really anything other than air going by the escape, how did <em>that </em>happen – and catch him glancing towards you too. He opens his mouth and says, “Well you know how I need to learn –”</p><p>“No,” you interrupt. “I’ll give you my word that I won’t hurt you or turn you in to the Fire Nation. But first, I need your word that you won’t turn me in either and that I can travel with you. Then I’ll think about taking my mask off.”</p><p>“Of course we won’t turn you into the Fire Nation.” Katara turns to her brother, setting her belongings aside. “Sokka, he helped Aang escape from one of the most secure Fire Nation stronghold. We should take all the help we can get. Zhao’s just going to keep chasing us.”</p><p>“That’s just what he claims. What if this is a trap,” he replies, getting up as well and walking closer to you with scrutiny in his eyes. You carefully do not twitch your hands towards your swords.</p><p>“It’s not,” you say, because as a nameless traitor, the only honor you have left is for small promises: a shared bowl of rice, a loaned knife, safe passage through a night. “All I can give is my word on my honor.”</p><p>The three look at each other with the silent communication of siblings and close friends. In particular, Sokka balks at the wide-eyed hangdog pleading on Aang’s face. Spirits, the Avatar really is a kid. Slumping and surely still tired from his fever, Sokka concedes, “Fine.”</p><p>The two younger members of their group turn beaming faces towards you.</p><p>You sigh. “Great.”</p><p>And then – just to get it over with because you’re so physically tired and you hate sleeping with the mask on and you’re frankly about to fall flat on your face, painfully – you pull your mask off.</p><hr/><p>When your hand drops, all three flinch back at once. All the adrenalin and action of the last twelve or more hours made a mess of your hair, strands escaping your braid and hanging in front of your eyes. You’re covered in dust and dried sweat and under the hypnotic allure of sleep, you don’t have the energy to parse out what they each react to in the deep shadows thrown by the minimal campfire: your scar, your pale skin and yellow eyes, your cheeks still hollowed by gauntness.</p><p>Sokka regains his bearings first. “You’re Fire Nation!”</p><p>Why is this so exhausting to explain? The people of Ba Sing Se hadn’t asked questions. Most of the merchants you worked with hadn’t asked questions. And those who did had asked more in line about the colonies, with the tacit understanding that those born in the stolen lands hadn’t any say in the matter.</p><p>You shake your head before he can continue. The mask in your hand thumps against your leg. “I was born there, but I’m not welcome anymore. That’s why I need to get out. I can’t get caught. If I do, they’ll probably execute me.”</p><p>Katara recovers next. “Is there something else we should call you? Beyond the Blue Spirit?”</p><p>“No,” you decide. Just thinking about explaining your whole spirit debt and personal stupidity fills your limbs with lead. Instead, you remind her, “We should get moving. The entire region must be on high alert by now. This is too close to patrols for us to recover.”</p><p>A giant yawn splits open Aang’s face, as if the word “recover” reminds his body that not long ago he was manhandled around a frigid swamp, dramatically chained up, broken out of prison, and ran back through a swamp again. “Yeah, let’s –” he yawns again “– let’s get on Appa and go.”</p><p>You help them roll up their bedrolls and pick up their bags. Katara makes a face at the laundry she’ll have to do at the first opportunity and tells you, “Most of this stuff isn’t ours, you can leave it.”</p><p>You nudge a rusted candlestick to the side with your foot. “Right.”</p><p>She helps you onto the saddle on the beast’s back. You begin to ask her, “So, do you use this to travel over la<em>aaaaah-</em>”</p><p>
  <em>Okay, you’re flying, you should have expected this, you’re FLYING.</em>
</p><hr/><p>With night soon falling and the group spending almost the whole day flying, Aang brings Appa down to land in a small clearing by a river. You’d been drifting off during the day, soaking up the sun as much as you could without accidentally kicking Sokka’s legs, and straighten out of your slump on the descent.</p><p>“We can make camp here,” Aang calls towards you all in the saddle. Once Appa lands, the Water Tribe siblings swing to the ground, packs slung over shoulders, with practiced ease. You stretch, then jump out after them.</p><p>The Avatar lands besides you. “I think you should tell them,” Aang says.</p><p>“Tell them? Oh.” You glance towards the siblings hauling out what you’ll all need to set up camp. You have to ask, “Are they going to react as well as you did?”</p><p>“Um, maybe not,” he admits. “But I need a teacher and there aren’t many other options.”</p><p>That drags your attention away from watching Katara pull a small pot out. Teach him? You? How long does he expect you’ll travel with them? He’s not wrong that there aren’t many options, but are you really the best choice so far? “I’ll tell them,” you reply and completely ignore the other topic.</p><p>Aang beams at you. “Great!”</p><p>Together, you draw closer to the campfire Sokka begins setting up. Casually saying, “By the way, I’m a firebender” is far too mortifyingly awkward, so instead you keep Aang between you and Katara behind you and say to Sokka, “Here, let me help.”</p><p>He draws back from the ring of stones and tented wood. “You got a set of spark stones?”</p><p>“Not exactly,” you say and flick your fingers. The tinder ignites.</p><p>Sokka clambers to his feet, cooking pot forgotten on the ground. “You’re a firebender?”</p><p>“Yes. Not a good one,” you say pointedly towards Aang.</p><p>“Sokka, this doesn’t have to be bad news,” Katara says as she walks over. Despite her words, she stays a careful distance away from you as she nears her brother. You don’t miss her flask at her side.</p><p>“You thought Jet was good news,” her brother retorts to her, whatever that means.</p><p>She flushes in the dimming light. “Well what about Fire Sage Shyu at Crescent Island?”</p><p><em>Crescent Island?</em> When did they – “When did you – <em>never mind</em>.” You shake your head.</p><p>“And guys, I need a firebending teacher,” Aang pipes up.</p><p>Lords and ladies of the spirit gods. “No,” you shoot him down. “At least, not by myself. I can get you started but I’m not a master. It’s been years since I’ve had training, my form’s a mess now. I can teach you enough that you won’t burn a whole town down, but for a fight against a master? A fight against –” your voice catches “—against, I’m guessing, the Fire Lord too? You’ll have to find someone else.”</p><p>“You keep saying you’re not good, but I’ve never seen anyone set their swords on fire the way you do.”</p><p>Sokka interjects, “<em>Swords</em> on <em>fire</em>? What did you two get up to?”</p><p>You ignore him and assure Aang through gritted teeth, “It’s extremely improper. That’s why you’ve never seen it before.”</p><p>“But you can teach Aang something, right?” Katara asks. Her wide eyes watch you and she explains, “Aang has to learn as much as he can, fast. If we don’t end the war before the end of summer, the whole world will be destroyed.”</p><p>“The comet,” you realize. Of course. Oh, <em>that’s </em>probably why the Fire Nation army’s been spreading out so aggressively starting just a little before you slipped into Ba Sing Se. You’d chalked it up to your father’s preference for wide scale aggression in contrast to your grandfather’s preference for concentrated campaigns. But if it’s maneuvering troops into position in anticipation of crushing the Earth Kingdom with one decisive simultaneous attack powered by the comet, they really will literally burn the whole world to the ground. And then what? Colonize the ash of destroyed lives and destroyed harvests?</p><p>Frustrated, you kick the ground. “Alright, I’ll teach you what I can.”</p><p>Looks like you’re stuck with these three for the long haul.</p><hr/><p>For the first time in two years, you knowingly <em>stay</em> in contested Fire Nation territory. In the chilly mornings, you wake up first as the sun rises, and you and Katara alternate days setting up the morning meal. You still don’t understand why they don’t sleep in shifts, but you’re a light enough sleeper that not much can take you by surprise at night, so you don’t fight this point.</p><p>The others begin waking up as you finish boiling some rice and dump in some of the edible plants you found while scavenging. You point Sokka towards the fresh fish you caught.</p><p>Katara frowns at your small portions again but at least she doesn’t say anything this time, after your many, increasingly testy assurances that what you eat is enough.</p><p>“Hey –” abruptly Sokka starts choking.</p><p>You scramble to your feet – did he swallow something wrong? His sister also shoots up from her seat – “<em>Sokka!</em>” – but he waves you both off, croaking, “I’m fine. Something must have gone down the wrong pipe.”</p><p>“You sure?” Aang worriedly asks.</p><p>Katara subsides and says with amusement, “The way you eat, something was bound to go down the wrong way eventually.”</p><p>“Katara,” Sokka whines and then with one last cough, straightens from his instinctual hunch. “Anyways,” a spasm of something crosses his face. “So, Blue Spirit, do you have any suggestions for evading the Fire Nation navy?”</p><p>You set aside your now empty bowl. “We should keep hiding in clouds Appa can blend in with. And I don’t know their exact locations, but there should be communication towers regularly along the coast that the navy uses to coordinate its movements. If we can sneak into one of those, then we’ll know the deployment orders of every ship around the world. Most ships should have a set patrol we can avoid.”</p><p>“Nice, here.” He runs off and brings back several maps. You point out vague areas you think the towers are and Aang provides some ideas about the air routes the messenger hawks would use.</p><p>The day continues. By evening, Sokka’s cradling his head in pain.</p><p>“What’s wrong?” Katara presses again. “Have you been drinking enough water?”</p><p>“Yes, I’ve been drinking enough water. I don’t get it, my head just hurts,” he groans. “I don’t get it. I’m just thinking that next time we get to a town, we should call Blue Spirit by something else, since we’re worried about him getting caught. Or any nickname. ‘The Blue Spirit’ is kind of a mouthful.”</p><p>You instantly understand the problem. “Stop thinking about it,” you advise the crown of his head. “It’s, it’s no use. If you stop thinking about any specific names except ‘Blue Spirit’ or ‘You’ for me, your headache should clear.”</p><p>His head lifts enough to frown at you. On Appa’s head, Aang stands and turns in curiosity to you, along with Katara’s questioning eyes.</p><p>“How does that make any sense?” Sokka asks.</p><p>It’s the spirits. Why should anything with them make sense. And so much for avoiding this discussion for long. You sigh, with what feels like a headache of your own rising. Why did the spirits take your name specifically? They could have taken your voice or your sight, or something else. You’ve read the tales as a child. But your name, that’s a blow worse than any bodily injury. You can’t even write the characters of your name anymore and it doesn’t bear thinking about what kind of havoc your mistake made with the records back at the palace. “A spirit tricked me. I lost my name. Only names given by spirits stick.”</p><p>You awkwardly settle, “Thanks for trying though.”</p><p>The others fall briefly silent and you take the chance to distract yourself by shaking your hair out of the braid coming apart. Facing into the wind created by Appa’s flying, you drag your hands through the strands, your ribbon held between your teeth, and redo your hair with practiced ease.</p><p>“A spirit tricked you? Is there any way for you to get your name back?” Katara asks.</p><p>“Do you know which spirit?” Aang adds.</p><p>You take the ribbon out of your mouth and tie off the end of the braid. “I’m working on it. And no, I don’t know which spirit. An old one.”</p><p>“We can help you,” offers Aang. “We helped out a village that was being attacked by a spirit. I bet we can help you with this too.”</p><p>Shaking your head, you tell him, “No. This matter’s personal. Besides, I’m almost done.”</p><p>Avatar or not, you really are almost done. There’s just whatever’s from the Water Tribes and you’re heading right towards one of them. Hopefully, your search will end there. This was your mistake; this is your debt to repay. No need bringing others into your troubles more than necessary.</p><p>“There’s just one more task I need to do,” you say. “After that, the spirits should give my name back. They <em>have</em> to.”</p><p>Sokka rubs his temple. “Any other personal details we should know about you?”</p><p>“No,” you say. Absolutely not.</p><hr/><p>Katara takes her turn teaching Aang first during the afternoon. You watch.</p><p>For someone that’s untrained, with only a few scrolls for instruction and improvising everything else up, she’s really not bad. She guides Aang through the transitions between ice and water with coaxing arms and twists of the wrist. It’s really nothing you’ve seen before, and you mentally test how you’d counter her attacks and overcome her defenses while you stretch. Sometime soon, you’re going to have to ask for a sparing match between all of you, just to see how much Ba Sing Se rusted your skills. The gangs of the Lower Ring aren’t enough practice for facing a professional army.</p><p>After exchanging bows with Katara, Aang bounds over to you with one air assisted jump. “So, Blue Spirit. How about some firebending lessons?” He grins.</p><p>At a more sedated pace, Katara walks over. She asks, “Mind if I watch?”</p><p>“Sure,” you reply and get up from the ground. You leave your swords propped against a tree truck and walk a few steps towards the river bank the two were just practicing at.</p><p>“Yes!” Aang cheers. “Finally, time to learn how to shoot some fire!”</p><p>You scoff lightly at his enthusiasm. “Not so fast,” you inform him. Now how to go about this?</p><p>“Fire, it…” you trail off and frown. You ignite a small flame in one palm and roll it over the back of your hand. What do you say? How do you explain?</p><p>Your tutors fed their flames with the shades of anger and pride that drove them and so had you for a long time until your anger couldn’t fill your stomach and it ran out of tinder. In your flailing back alley fights and your messy experiments, you found new kindling, but over a year in you still haven’t found the exact words for it. “Fire is energy,” you decide to say, instead of remotely talking about feelings.</p><p>“If comes from within, fueled by the breath and weighted by your root. It does not flow like water and air. It does not stand still like earth. You must control how much you feed it, or else it will feed itself and burn until only ash remains. If you do not respect fire, it will not respect you.”</p><p>“Oh,” he says. “Well, how do I start?”</p><p>“First, we’ll work on your stance and your breathing. Get into a ready position.” You narrow your eyes as he drops into something that can’t even remotely count as ready.</p><p>Yeah, you’re not teaching this kid how to set anything on fire until he’s better at putting <em>out</em> fires first.</p><hr/><p>By the time you all run into Bato, you’re ready to sprint into an ocean from being in constant close quarters. The only time you have to yourself is in the early mornings, and you’re thankful for having at least that, but the otherwise constant interactions and socializing sends you squirming. You’re being penned in from all sides, even with open skies overhead all the time. There’s a reason you went without roommates despite Ba Sing Se’s rent prices. You’ve been on your own for too long to figure out how groups work again. Temper flares only increase your stress.</p><p>Then the four of you come across the scene of a fight and a grounded Water Tribe ship.</p><p>You uneasily trail after the group, alongside Appa, as Bato leads you all towards a nearby abbey. Ahead, you can hear Katara and Sokka clamoring for news of their father. How is he? How are the other men? What fights have they been in, where are they going? Did dad really do that?</p><p>How does it feel to be so sought after?</p><p>Unbidden, your steps slow.</p><p>How does it feel to be so missed?</p><p>When Bato introduces you all to the nuns of the abbey – “These are Hakoda’s children. They and their friend have been traveling with the Avatar” – you silently bow.</p><p>“Come along,” he says, and leads them towards a door.</p><p>“You guys go ahead,” you tell them. “There are some things I want to talk about with the nuns.”</p><p>“Alright,” Aang says as the siblings already file off after Bato.</p><p>In exchange for staying mostly out from underfoot, the sisters of the abbey trade news with you amicably enough. They help you update the recent state of the Fire Nation’s relentless advancement. You help them figure out the hold up behind some of their shipments, namely the near total collapse through incompetence and sickness of one of the trade rings they use. They explain the basis behind their healing ointments, and you share the smattering of information you picked up from Doctor Mihuang.</p><p>One sister, in an understandably misguided attempt to comfort you or something, asks, “Why don’t you join your friends? I know all these recipes are boring you.”</p><p>And sit on the sides as you watch the siblings reconnect with someone they obviously consider like an uncle in all but name? Watch as Katara and Sokka sate their hunger for news of the father they haven’t seen in years like the desert-parched plant welcomes water? Are they still chasing stories of halcyon memories?</p><p>You can’t intrude, you can’t sit there as your own father’s voice rises like a ghost you thought exorcised, you thought buried and slain in the grave you entombed it in, unseen, for most of your banishment. Azula won’t come running at your side if your mother miraculously resurrects. There will be no hugs at your reunions, no warm meal shared on a plate between you.</p><p>“It’s fine,” you say to the nun. “Tell me more about these oils.”</p><hr/><p>“Maybe I can just watch from the shore.”</p><p>“Come on, Blue Spirit,” Sokka coaxes. “You should join us, so you can really see what ice dodging is all about.”</p><p>You glance towards Bato’s bandaged arm and the still disturbed earth from the fighting. Your feet shift in the sand and you shake your head. “No. This is a Water Tribe rite of passage. It doesn’t feel right for me to intrude.”</p><p>“You won’t be intruding,” Bato says. He turns a warm gaze down upon his chief’s children. “I trust Sokka and Katara’s judgment. If they trust you, I do too.”</p><p>Katara extends a hand towards you. “Join us.”</p><p>How do they accept you so easily? Sure, breaking Aang out of Zhao’s hold is a mark in your favor. But is that and a few firebending lessons where Aang grows progressively more antsy as you two keep hitting roadblocks over his sense of control truly enough to include you into something so important?</p><p>You haven’t told them why you are banished. You haven’t told them a single word about who you really are.</p><p>Uncertain, you slowly take Katara’s hand.</p><hr/><p>This is the fourth wanted poster you’ve seen for the Blue Spirit, though this is the first that comes from any official capacity. You pull the poster off while Aang grips his own poster. You read the text. “Hey, I’m definitely worth more than three hundred gold pieces,” you complain.</p><p>You glance back up at the bulletin and, <em>huh</em>, the former Admiral Jeong Jeong’s been seen in the area? You pull that poster down too.</p><p>“Let’s not go into that town,” Katara says. “It’s too dangerous, both you and Blue Spirit have wanted posters.”</p><p>“But what if there are firebending masters there?” Aang asks.</p><p>“In a town like this? Any master from here would have long left,” you answer. Rolling up the posters, you slip them away. “Let’s keep moving.”</p><hr/><p>“Ugh, this is getting us <em>nowhere</em>,” you finally snap. You yank the errant flames out of the burning shrubs and trees. A splash of water dowses the rest.</p><p>“Blue Spirit, don’t <em>yell</em> at him. That isn’t going to help,” Katara says with not an insubstantial amount of frustration herself.</p><p>Aang cringes. “Sorry.”</p><p>“Sorry isn’t going to cut it,” you bark. “If I wasn’t here, you could have burned us all. You either keep feeding the flame too much or you don’t feed it at all. It’s like you can’t stand firm and control how much you give.”</p><p>You run a hand over the tense creases of your face. “Maybe I’m just not cut out to be your teacher.”</p><p>Katara sighs and calls her water back into her flask. With a guilty puff of wind, Aang dissipates the lingering smoke. Her voice softer, Katara says, “Actually, maybe it’s not either of you that’s the problem. Aang’s bending isn’t firm enough, right?”</p><p>You lift your head from your hand. “It’s not <em>direct</em>. It’s not –” you wave vaguely at his legs. “It’s not grounded enough. Without a root, I can knock you right off your feet, Aang, and make your shots go wild.”</p><p>“Then I guess Aang does need to learn earthbending first. If there’s any martial form that’s about being grounded, I bet that’ll be earth,” she continues.</p><p>That does make sense. The Avatar cycle exists for a reason. Disappointed, Aang says, “Guess firebending lessons are on hold.”</p><p>From the safe distance he’d been watching the proceedings from while sharpening his weapons, Sokka pipes up, “Does this mean I get the Blue Spirit for training all on my own then?”</p><p>You shrug in acquiescence and he whoops in good cheer. Meanwhile, a thought churns in your head. This war must end and this, somehow this, is the world’s best chance. With your father at the helm of the Fire Nation and your sister in the wings, they’ll never surrender, they’ll never call a ceasefire. If the war doesn’t end soon, there won’t be a world left. There won’t be a Fire Nation left either.</p><p>A starved allegiance flares, despite the years you spend stamping down any overt sympathies for a people clothed in red. A people you forbid yourself from even in your deepest thoughts considering <em>yours</em>. You avoided them so long and well that you hadn’t examined in detail what cost explicitly going against them would extract from your body and spirit.</p><p>Well, this is for the long-term good of a people that once called a boy crown prince, before he was banished and stripped of his name.</p><p>“If you all aren’t busy, there’s something else,” you tell Aang. “I can’t teach you how to firebend. But I can teach you how to fight <em>against</em> firebenders. Katara, Sokka, you too.”</p><p>“Now?”</p><p>“Yeah.” You wave Sokka over. Grabbing his club and boomerang, he ambles towards the group of you.</p><p>The three of them stand in a half-circle before you. You move into the most basic ready stance. Hopefully, you won’t be as horrible a teacher trying to guide them through this. “The Fire Nation believes the offense is core to the best defense. They push forward in their conviction. But as I was explaining to Aang, if you can knock a firebender off balance, you can take over the fight.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Fun fact, the line “Why didn’t you just eat that damn apple?” was originally supposed to be the midpoint of this fic and was where I planned on making the only chapter break. </p><p>I’m also pretending that Katara never lost her necklace because honestly, Zhao isn’t picking that up.</p><p>Side note: forgot about this sketch while I was posting the chapter<br/></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>After almost three years, the movements come unfamiliar. Doesn’t help that you preferred ponytails as a child. And that when you were younger you had – </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Well. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Earth Kingdom browns in front of a background of Water Tribe ice walls and a slightly lopsided Fire Nation knot upon your head; you make a sight in the mirror.</i>
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          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>where’s the atla content about deep-sea biology</p><p>The original chapter 6 was spanning uuuuhhhh eight episodes and fast approaching 15-20K. lol no. </p><p>For the full effect of this chapter and the next, I suggest you keep creator work skins on and have a light background instead of dark mode.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The fox, when it arrives, decides to prance on Sokka’s sleeping form. “<em>Hugh, </em>what? Huh?” he flails. “What is <em>that!</em>”</p><p>Katara screams.</p><p>Howling with laughter, the fox rolls off Sokka while you groan in defeat. Between cackles it says, “We see You has friends now! You have decided to travel with someone! We never guessed!”</p><p>“You didn’t exactly give me a choice,” you yell. “I was doing great in Ba Sing Se! I didn’t ask to get launched across the continent.”</p><p>Its mouth opens wide with hoots and tittering. Its eyes blaze as it flips off its back and sprints at you. With a somersault, it lands on your head.</p><p>“<em>Augh</em>.”</p><p>“Blue Spirit, is that a spirit?” Katara shrieks. “Why does it look like that?”</p><p>“How does its eyes keep moving around like that?” Sokka wails.</p><p>You yank at the fox in a fruitless attempt to dislodge its ass from your head. “Calm – <em>ugh</em> – down. <em>Get off</em>. It’s just a messenger. Will you <em>get off me</em>.”</p><p>It smacks a clawed paw against your hand. The laughter deepens into something even more disturbing.</p><p>“Yeah, this is … something,” Aang faintly says.</p><p>“Are things always this hectic?” a voice drawls. You glance towards it, and –</p><p>You think it’s a cat. Sure, instead of wings there are eight eyes and tufts of fur extending from sharp ears and each of its paws are too wide with extra toes. But it’s probably a cat.</p><p>“<em>Yes</em>,” you spit while simultaneously the fox heckles, “Nope!”</p><p>If the cat’s pure blue eyes could roll, you bet they’d be rolling now. It declares, “We have no time for this. Get down for You’s head.”</p><p>Sulking, the fox drips down between your fingers. You shudder at the quicksilver sensation. The horrified expression sits on Katara’s face like it had been carved on. Sokka and Aang stare bug-eyed. Crawling out of his bedroll, Sokka says, “This is honestly worse than that time with the Hei Bai spirit.”</p><p>The cat’s head splits into two copies so one head can whip around and stare at him judgmentally while the other continues blandly watching the whining fox at your feet. He shudders.</p><p>“Just, let’s just get this over with,” you tell the spirits. It’s been months since you’ve seen one of these foxes and frankly, they’re just as bad as you remember them being. “What artifact did you spirits leave with the Water Tribe that you’re going to send me hunting after?”</p><p>The cat’s tails wave and it smiles with a mouth full of fangs. “Not quite. As We told You, events have changed. The Bridge returned to the world out of its hiding.” A face turns towards Aang. “Your duties move in accordance.”</p><p>It stops smiling and considers its words. “We had granted a gift upon the North,” it eventually says. “You will protect our gift with everything you have. You will protect our gift with everything you have not. All threats to our gift must be eradicated. This is a promise; this is an order.” The cat smiles again, grimly this time.</p><p>You ask it and the attendant fox dejectedly resting its head on some of its paws while staring at your hair, “And I’ll recognize this gift once I reach the Northern Water Tribe?”</p><p>When the cat hums, the sound rolls through the camp like a distant foghorn, more felt than heard. “You will,” it agrees. “You will <em>definitely</em> know when it is threatened.”</p><p>“What about us?” Aang asks from the side. Sokka and Katara send him alarmed expressions as the cat’s two heads merge back together and it turns it frigid smile at him. Its tails continue thumping against the dirt.</p><p>“Nothing,” it says simply. “This matter lies between Us and You. You will take care of matters without you.”</p><p>Facing you again, it nods and stretches. Waves ripple along its long spine. “Good day,” it says, then scuffs the fox, and together, the two spirits vanish between one blink and the next. You glare at the space they were at.</p><p>Silence rings in the camp.</p><p>“<em>What</em>,” Sokka heaves, “<em>was that.</em>”</p><hr/><p>“I think I’m going to have nightmares. In fact, I <em>am</em> having nightmares,” Sokka tells you, because he’s <em>still</em> going on about the messengers’ visit from several days ago.</p><p>“They’re spirits, they’re just like that,” you growl as you clean your swords.</p><p>Affronted, he says, “Spirits are <em>not</em> ‘just like that.’ Hei Bai and the Spirit World weren’t!”</p><p>“Well, these spirits are, and they have been the whole time I’ve known them!”</p><p>“Would you two <em>please</em> knock it off,” Katara groans from the other side of Appa’s saddle.</p><p>“Sorry,” Sokka says, chastised.</p><p>“Sorry,” you mutter and begin putting away your equipment.</p><p>She sighs and leans back further into the saddle’s wall. Turning her head away from you, she asks Aang, “Any sign of those air walkers?”</p><p>“No,” he admits. “But we are getting closer to the Northern Air Temple. That’s probably where those people are. Just a few more minutes, and we should see the towers.”</p><p>Belongings all packed back into your bag, you say, “That’s great. Let us know when you see anything.” And with that, you settle back into concentrating on heating up the air in the saddle.</p><p>You focus on your breathing and on what the altitude’s thinner air might do to your bending. The highest you’ve been before was either at the Eastern Air Temple or climbing one of the volcanos at the Fire Nations’ home islands. And neither of those can quite compare to the snowcapped peaks passing below you. Your flameless heat shivers even as you breathe in deeper.</p><p>“Are all firebenders like portable heaters?” Sokka asks.</p><p>With your eyes still closed, you tell him, “No. This is actually something I picked up and modified from an airbending scroll. There are ways for firebenders to heat themselves up, but not usually the air around them too.”</p><p>“Huh.” There’s the sound of cloth moving and his knife scrapping against wood. “Well, it’s pretty nice.”</p><p>You hum and go back to your meditation.</p><p>As promised, a few minutes later Aang sounds the call for the approaching temple. Then, with a bristling disappointment, you hear him say, “They’re not airbenders.”</p><hr/><p>Airbenders or not, and gliding or not, these people have figured out how to fly. Wide-eyed, you take an offered glider without a second thought and while Katara hovers at the platform’s edge, you sprint right past her and Teo and fling yourself into the air. At the edge of your hearing, someone says, “Well, that works.”</p><p>The clouds roll out below you, on and on and on. Wind tugs at the fur of the second-hand coat you bought a few days ago in anticipation of the arctic ice.</p><p>The wind and air drifts catch against the glider’s cloth and lift you in curling circles around the towers. Your numb hands grip the wooden poles, feeling the flex and give of the rods, and with a quickly glance around for anyone you might crash into, you copy the tight loops you saw from the other fliers.</p><p>You don’t realize your breathless laughter until Aang pulls up beside you with a knowing smile, and he bends a current that lifts you even higher towards the sun.</p><hr/><p>Still processing the prototypes and weapons you saw in what should have been the temple’s inner most sanctuary, you understand a bit better why Guru Pathik steered you away from blindly charging in at the Eastern Air Temple.</p><p>Katara speaks up first. “Should we have let Aang go with them by himself?”</p><p>“They’ll be fine,” her brother says.</p><p>“I think I’ve seen some of those designs before,” you admit. “Teo’s father isn’t the only designer the Fire Army has. But I definitely think I’ve seen some of those weapons before.”</p><p>It’s with that cheerful thought in mind when Aang approaches with a stony expression. He says into a shocked silence, “The Fire Nation’s army is coming.”</p><p>“How’s the Fire Nation army coming?” Katara asks.</p><p>You find it more important to focus on: “When will they arrive?”</p><p>“A man from the Fire Nation arrived, trying to get more stuff from Teo’s dad. I told him to leave, so he did to get his men,” he explains. “They should be here soon.”</p><p>“Aang, the people here can’t fight off a whole army. How are we going to keep them from burning this whole place down and making it all go kablooey?” asks Sokka.</p><p>With a grin taking over his face, Aang says, “Well, we have something they don’t. Air power.”</p><p>As he explains and the mechanist comes out, pledging his support, you stay carefully quiet. Attacking a peaceful settlement of refugees with the full might of a regiment – that’s wrong, there’s no debate about that. The situation here, it’s plain extortion. And you haven’t been able to muster up the approval, the fealty, to see an air temple attacked and demolished in years. This army must be –</p><p>But –</p><p>Can you –</p><p>Can you really –</p><p>Katara notices you stalling in the middle of the bridge as everyone else files back into the building. She calls for you, “Blue Spirit, there’s no time.”</p><p>She’s right. Depending on where the enemy made camp, they could be upon the temple in minutes or about an hour. The thin air and the exertion of the climb will slow the march, but not that much. There isn’t time for your doubts.</p><p>But you’ve never faced the Fire Nation head on like this before. You’ve never faced the <em>fighting</em> involved in the war head on like this before. The closest you came was stealing from the more unruly and ruthless officers and their divisions. Otherwise, you kept away, as far as you could, spirit interference notwithstanding.</p><p>You’ve never killed a Fire Nation soldier before. It would be too easy: a blast of your fire or Aang’s air against men standing too close to the edge. Katara, with all this snow as her ammunition, could bury people in the life and heat stealing ice. To say nothing of whatever weapons are lying around, cooked up by Teo’s father.</p><p>You wrench yourself over into the group’s wake. Katara regards you with a light frown and now Sokka’s turning too, investigating the hold up. She asks, “What’s wrong?”</p><p>Plenty of things are wrong, but because you can’t explain yourself worth anything, what comes out of you is: “They’re Fire Nation.”</p><p>“Yeah, they’re –” Sokka starts then stops. Whatever he sees in your hesitation, it gives him enough pause to hold for a breath, then continue, testing his waters, “Fireballs, murder, destroy this whole temple and kill everyone in it. You know.”</p><p>You grimace because yes, you know. Pinching the bridge of your nose does nothing to help settle your rising nerves, but the motion gives you enough time to try scraping the words together. “I <em>know</em>. How are you planning on taking them out? How are you planning on stopping them from coming back for round two?”</p><p>He answers, “We’re figuring that out inside.” With a few steps, he comes beside you and places a hand on your left arm. The jolt of his touch travels through your spine while he says, “Come on.”</p><p>Though he must have no love for the Fire Nation army, for the men and women among its ranks and staffing its officers, for the people who are his enemy but who are <em>yours</em>, your people, his gaze upon you holds a sympathy that unsticks your frozen feet.</p><hr/><p>The snow does nothing to muffle the vibrations of the advancing tanks. You can’t focus on them, your firebending does nothing against the plates of metal and it’ll take too long to superheat whatever system steers and drives them. But you can hamper the squads of pikemen and distract everyone from getting too good a look at your uncovered face. You redirect blooms of fire from one group to another, turning away the attacks as first Aang, then Katara land beside you. For a wild moment, you’re glad for their presence at your side, as this fight proves to be exactly as anxiety inducing as you predicted.</p><p>But in the haze of the acid smell of the smoke bombs and the sour smell of the stink bombs and the mountain’s winds tugging at your flame in the cold, thin air, there’s no place or time for you to think about anything except punches, redirections, and kicks. Snow darkens into slush at your feet. With definitely offended intent, fire concentrates upon you.</p><p>When Appa lands with a roar, you scramble onto his saddle with Katara and Aang, giving you the first clear look at how many soldiers were mustered for the attack. It’s a lot.</p><p>It’s too much.</p><p>In your couple years’ travel, you came across too many burned fields. Too many meadows regrowing thin and pale with fragile plants breaking through a layer of ash. Ba Sing Se runs overflowing with the hushed stories and the refugees. Yingxi and his eight siblings weren’t born in the great city. He never talks about how it happened. Did his family stumble out of their house to the thunder of galloping komodo rhinos? Were the fields that fed them burned to the dirt and trampled under the steel wheels of the relentless tanks? Were the rice fields of their town poisoned by waste poured into an upstream river?</p><p>Stubborn stone fills the Earth Kingdom, but even stone can crack and crumble under an onslaught of heat. You ran away from the war along with the people escaping collapsing towns.</p><p>But if you’re really fighting alongside the Avatar until this war is won and the Fire Nation’s thirst for conquest is brought to heel, there’s no more running for you. There’s no more hiding behind walls while there’s a fight you can apply yourself to. A fight no longer saturated with misery but a fight shifting and changing with the tantalizing promise of hope.</p><p>You can’t stay out of this war anymore; you’ll fight until either you end it with Aang, or it ends you.</p><p>The war balloon rises.</p><p>The explosion that soon follows punches through you, from your feet through your lungs to your head, like the uppercut of a giant’s brutal fist. It leaves you gasping with your heart thundering and your ears ringing. How you weren’t knocked flat onto your back, you don’t know, and you shake the quivering out of your body in time to hear Sokka’s shout as he plummets.</p><p>“<em>Give me that</em>,” you yell and grab the nearest glider. As you sprint for the edge, you hear Aang call out, “I’m coming with you.”</p><p>You hurtle after the balloon. The cold wind scrapes against your face as you shoot through the air.</p><p>“Get out of his way, get out of his way.” Sokka crowds the mechanist against the wall of the airship. Yanking your feet out of the footholds, you fling yourself from the glider, and land with a thump and a roll in the basket. As you spring back up, he shouts, “<em>Hurry</em>.”</p><p>With a roar, you punch a stream of fire into the balloon. Aang lands in the basket far more gently than you did, and asks, “What do you need me to do?”</p><p>“I can’t control your fire at the same time I’m fueling this,” you grit out. The balloon’s descent begins flattening. “But if you can give us some lift with hot air, that would be great.”</p><p>“Got it.”</p><p>“Sokka, the rudder,” the mechanist says. The two squeeze past you as you wrangle the stream of fire going into the balloon’s mouth in between the jets of air Aang pushes in too.</p><p>It takes fiddling, but a few minutes later, the war balloon lands upon the stone plaza. The crowd stands awaiting your collective return and cheers as first Sokka, then the mechanist, and you and Aang climb out of the basket. Without your flames expanding the air inside the balloon, you watch the cloth slowly begin to deflate. Back on solid ground without a hoard of soldiers to fight off, you finally notice a fine tremor in your hands, invisible but as undeniably there as a struck tuning fork.</p><p>There’s a hand on your shoulder. “You doing okay?”</p><p>You look up towards Sokka’s light smile at the edge of his lips, as sure as his firm hand, and you nod. “Yeah.”</p><hr/><p>You hold tight onto the tentative hope that the spirits won’t bother you again while you’re at the North Pole. Or on the way to the North Pole as it is, since you all still haven’t figured out where the Northern Water Tribe is located.</p><p>When you decided to learn how to maintain a flameless heat to ward off winter, you never expected you’d be testing it against an artic climate too.</p><p>Leaning on your crossed arms atop Appa’s saddle, you ask Aang, “How <em>aren’t</em> you feeling cold? Katara and Sokka are from the South Pole and they’re wearing more than you are right now.”</p><p>“It is a little cold,” Aang allows. “But there’s ice in the sky too if you get high enough. Airbenders learn how to regulate the air around them. It helps us keep warm.”</p><p>Yeah. You remember. You still don’t understand that one scroll.</p><p>“Sure you don’t need a coat?” you ask while frowning at his thin layers.</p><p>He glances at Sokka and Katara’s fur lined parkas made with dyed pelts and cloth. “I’m sure.”</p><p>The next day, you all find the Northern Tribe. Or rather, the Northern Water Tribe finds you.</p><hr/><p>Katara looks to her left, and says, surprised, “When did you switch seats with Sokka?”</p><p>“A while ago,” you say curtly, none of which is her fault. Or the fault of the princess who sat to your left, triggering Sokka’s spirited attempts to hold a conversation around you.</p><p>You examine the remains on your plate and debate what you should do with it: seaweed strips and slices of ribs with the fat carefully cooked so it won’t quickly congeal in the chilled air; empty shells on the side and full shells in the middle; something that tasted quite like fowl.</p><p>Over half of your plate remains, but you’re already full.</p><p>“How rude would it be,” you ask Katara because Sokka’s completely useless at the moment and Aang already ran over to the waterbending master, “if I didn’t finish this plate?”</p><p>She looks at your plate too. “How do you eat so <em>little?</em>” she wonders.</p><hr/><p>The waterbending master, Master Pakku, glances at you with narrowed eyes before turning his attention back to Katara and Aang. You glare right back at him. Serves him right. What <em>is</em> this about not taking on girls for combat lessons?</p><p>If anyone tried telling Azula to only be a demure, silent princess, she’d burn them, and it would only be their fault. And there’s Mai and there’s Ty Lee and honestly many of the Home Guard. True, there are less women in the invading armies, but not that much less.</p><p>To be fair, the Fire Nation’s lack of restrictions might come from the whole “let’s conquer the world” campaign your family’s been waging for a hundred years.</p><p>But wait, if Aang had been a girl, would the Northern Tribe also refuse to teach her? Even with the whole world on the line? They can’t, right?</p><p>On the march over, Katara had quietly fumed, “In the Southern Tribe, we had female benders that fought too.” Then her posture slumped. “Before the raiders took them all.”</p><p>You hadn’t really known what to say.</p><p>You do know to shout, “<em>Kick his ass!</em>” as she and Master Pakku wreck the plaza with their fight.</p><p>Water shifts back and forth into ice and Katara blocks a heavy stream of water with a modified wall she’d been practicing against one of your stronger scything attacks. In a move that’s definitely borrowed from your propensity for taking advantage of your environment as much as you can, she tries cracking and melting the ice beneath the master’s feet. But he has stronger command over the water and merely leaps out of the way. Her hair growing progressively messier, Katara keeps rolling back onto her feet.</p><p>It’s a fight that from the start is one-sided.</p><p>Spears of ice whistle down from the sky.</p><p>After, after Katara reclaims her necklace, after you and Aang run down the stairs towards where she stands, soaked in the freezing air, Master Pakku turns to look back one last time before he disappears down the stairs towards the city below. His eyes land and stare at you.</p><p>Not on Aang, asking Katara, “Do you think this means you’ll be at class tomorrow?” Not on Katara, saying, “I’ll be there even if he tells me no again.” Not on Sokka who’s run off after the princess you can’t look at for prolonged periods of time.</p><p>He stares at you and you glower back. Then, without a word, he turns away and soon disappears from your view.</p><hr/><p>When Princess Yue seeks you out in a rare moment where her tribesmen leave you largely alone to pace the latest training hall you set up camp in, you’re instantly on guard. No one’s saying anything explicitly, but the Northern Tribe’s reception to your presence is definitely cooler than their greetings to the Avatar and those from their sister tribe. You can’t blame them, as aggravating as it might be when the other warriors in the training classes you tag along to with Sokka fight dirtier against you than they did against him. Sure enough, tribesmen soon appear to surreptitiously stand guard for the princess.</p><p>She bows her head at the shallow angle of royalty to valued guest. Or you think so; you’re completely willing to admit that you aren’t certain how closely the Water Tribe mirrors the Earth Kingdom or Fire Nation.</p><p>“Blue Spirit, how have you found your accommodations?” she asks.</p><p>You tell her the accommodations are fine and warily wait through the pleasantries and small talk you’ve completely lost what little skill you had in. She smiles pleasantly. You grimly arrange your face into as neutral an expression as you can.</p><p>Finally, she slips in as smooth as slick ice, “You have been touched by the spirits.”</p><p>“So have you.”</p><p>You felt it the second Appa swam into the city, you felt it in the water on the way in, just barely there on the edge of your notice until it rose and crested into a presence impossible to ignore. Like a low hum of noise, of gallons of water shifting from the smallest stream to the vast, deep ocean. It sets your nerves vibrating and looking at her for long periods of time makes something unnamed crawl through your chest. In her, being touched by the spirits is a <em>gift</em>.</p><p>“The moon spirit,” Princess Yue agrees.</p><p><em>The</em> gift.</p><p>“I prayed, then I made a deal,” you say and close yourself off from further explanation.</p><p>The hum of her veins pulls on yours. Or no, not quite. There’s something else the Northern Water Tribe holds within its walls. Something stronger, much stronger, than a life-saving gift.</p><p>There’s something else. A different gift.</p><hr/><p>It’s about a week after you all arrived when you come back from an early morning bath, lightly steaming. You drag your fingers through your loose hair and muse, “Everyone here knows I’m really from the Fire Nation and not the Kingdom already, right?”</p><p>“Seems so,” Sokka answers.</p><p>Grabbing your hair tie, you set off in search of the mirror you think you saw earlier.</p><p>“You’re not doing your braid?” he asks.</p><p>After almost three years, the movements come unfamiliar. Doesn’t help that you preferred ponytails as a child. And that when you were younger you had –</p><p>Well.</p><p>Your hands gather your hair and pull it back in straight lines. Technically, you should be using oils as well, but you haven’t bothered with something as expensive and refined as that your whole banishment. Setting the comb down, you pick up your tie.</p><p>Earth Kingdom browns in front of a background of Water Tribe ice walls and a slightly lopsided Fire Nation knot upon your head; you make a sight in the mirror. You frown and yank out the tie to redo your hair. It comes out more balanced this time. You don’t have the pins to hold it securely in place and you turn your head from side to side, measuring the shifted weight.</p><p>“Where did all that hair go?” Sokka says from behind you.</p><p>“There’s supposed to be a headpiece too,” your voice softly says. How long has it been since you’ve looked like this? Or, well, technically – technically with the scar. You’ve never looked like this before.</p><p>In the mirror, your hands drift down. Sokka’s reflection flicks its attention between your hair and your expression. How odd it is, that the first time in years you don’t have to hide where you’re from is at the Northern Water Tribe.</p><p>Standing up, you grab your swords and head for the curtains leading outside. “Let’s go.”</p><p>When the fighters of the tribe catch on to why you and Sokka stake out one of the training halls, what feels like every single man in fighting condition materializes at the sidelines. A couple benders even reconfigure the walls so there’s more space for the crowd. Just what you want and need: several dozen people watching you fight and judging your skills.</p><p>“You’re going down this time,” Sokka crows.</p><p>Smirking, you taunt, “Oh really? Like how <em>you</em> went down the last six times?”</p><p>With an offended noise, he charges.</p><p>For the first few rounds, you trade parries with him with your cold steel. The quarters are too tight for his boomerang, so Sokka comes at you with alternating club and spear. After crossing blades with him and the northern warriors, you notice slight differences in how he crafted his weapons compared to them. Different poles, different styles.</p><p>The crowd parts as he drives you into a temporary retreat, until a slight break in his push forward gives you just enough time to slip out from his reach, sprint for a wall, and kick off it at a high leap that sends you smashing into him from above. Not for the first time, he mutters, “Why do you <em>fight like</em> <em>this</em>.”</p><p>You let your swords answer.</p><p>When it comes time for you to practice firebending, the two of you and all the onlookers move outside. You ask Sokka, “Want to make this more challenging or not?”</p><p>“Yeah, bring it,” he decides.</p><p>The four of you figured that sparing without flames is safer while you teach the others how to fight against firebenders. But it’s also harder, as your bursts travel invisibly, unlike Aang’s bending. You tried mixing in sparks to make things easier, except your concentration can’t keep up with separating heat from frame and inevitably you end up switching back to normal firebending on each attempt. Sokka and Katara quickly learn how to dodge and roll out of the way from hits they misjudge.</p><p>His boomerang enters the sparring now and you duck into a slide over slick ice you melted a thin layer of water on. Your hands slam into the ground, arresting your movement, and your legs fling waves of heat towards him. Sokka jumps to clear the attack. You flip back onto your feet. The crowd titters when they feel warmth wash over them.</p><p>The club swings down in the new move he learned two days ago. You dodge and he dodges your attempt to get under his guard. The crowd’s chatter increases in volume.</p><p>After you finally take him down with a whirling wall that he can’t avoid fast enough, a voice from the crowd asks, “Can you not bend fire?”</p><p>Helping Sokka off the damp ground, you glance over to Master Pakku and what looks like his whole class. Aang and Katara wave. In answer, you punch your left first into the air, shooting fire into the sky with a bang.</p><p>He mulls over your unorthodox bending. “I’ll like to see how my advanced students fare against you,” he decides. With a sarcastic smirk, he adds, “If you’re not tired.”</p><p>“You want a fight? I’ll give them a fight,” you declare.</p><p>“Very well. Rulak.” A man in his lower twenties steps forward from the audience.</p><p>As Sokka leaves the impromptu ring, he says, “You show them, Blue Spirit.”</p><p>You nod and settle into a ready position.</p><hr/><p>By the time you’ve been slammed into a pool of water almost a dozen times and had your various limbs frozen solid even more frequently, all the while giving as good as you get, including one opponent you launch straight into the crowd with one barehanded fling, Master Pakku finally dismisses the show for lunch. Katara immediately latches onto your scraped hands and the places under your clothing where you’re definitely bruising. She says, “You should get these checked on.”</p><p>“I’ll be fine,” you say, however, she grabs your wrist in an iron hold and drags you off to the healing huts. At least she lets you redo your hair on the way there.  </p><p>The woman inside smiles at your arrivals. “Katara, how are you, dear? Blue Spirit, I heard you’ve been giving the men a good fight. Have either of you eaten yet?”</p><p>“Healer Yugoda, we’ve been well. We’ll eat when we’re done here,” Katara reassures her. “Blue Spirit’s been a punching bag for half of Master Pakku’s students. I thought we should just check up on some of his scrapes and bruises.”</p><p>“I’m fine,” you uselessly repeat. “I beat them up as much as they beat me up.”</p><p>“We’re already here, just accept the healing,” she overrides you.</p><p>Laughing, Yugoda leads you towards a bench. “Have a seat. Let me have a look at your hands.”</p><p>Grudgingly, you sit down and extend your hands for inspection. Her left hand takes yours, turning them gently to inspect the scrapes against your palms and over your fingertips. She makes a faint humming noise upon touching your hands, warmed against the icy air. With her right hand, she calls over a small globe of water. She asks, “Would you like to help, Katara?”</p><p>“Alright,” Katara agrees, and accepts the water. Soon the liquid coats your hands and just … hangs there.</p><p>A frown creases Katara’s expression. She mutters, “That’s odd,” and settles into a deeper level of concentration.</p><p>But the water continues numbing your fingers, cold and shifting in search of something. “Healer Yugoda, there’s something odd blocking me,” she says with a thin thread of worry.</p><p>The healer’s faint smile fades into a flat line as the water transfer back into her hands. It still remains transparent and cold over your skin. You have no idea what’s supposed to be happening. Then Healer Yugoda says, “That <em>is</em> odd.”</p><p>The water withdraws. You snap your fingers a few times, bringing feeling back into your numb nerves. Healer Yugoda regards you in silence for a few moments, weighing her words. Katara’s eyes flick between you and her, her hands folding together in concern.</p><p>“What was the nature of your deal with the spirits, child?” Healer Yugoda asks.</p><p>Oh boy. “I prayed for safety and food one day. I got … a bit more than that.”</p><p>A single eyebrow raises, prodding for more.</p><p>You swallow and shift your weight on the bench, in an almost unthinking preparation to sprint out of the room at the slightest indication. “I, I think I’m part spirit.” This is the first time you said that aloud. “For the price of my name. I’m not entirely clear.”</p><p>Healer Yugoda takes your hands again. She says, “Healing a spirit is not like healing those of the mortal world. Your blood and bones still remembers their roots as human, but as Katara noticed, there’s a layer on top blocking the full effects of healing.” A soft glow finally begins shining in the water. “This will be the best we can do through waterbending.”</p><p>When the water draws away and finally returns to its pool, you turn your hands. Your scrapes have scabbed over and faded faintly. It’s not much, the progress of a few days of natural healing. Your palms don’t sting when you press against the shallow wounds. But it’s really not a lot.</p><p>“That doesn’t seem good,” Katara worries.</p><p>You shrug. “I’m hardier than normal people now. Seems a fair trade.”</p><p>Doesn’t stop her from biting her lip in quiet distress.</p><hr/><p>Aang puts the Northern Water Tribe into an awkward position. In a land of ice, plants don’t grow, not on a farmable scale. And all their cooking oils come from animals. He and Appa eat seaweed by the fistful. From somewhere, the tribe scrounges up berries and dried fruit. Someone assembles bread from a new shipment of flour bought from the Earth Kingdom. He eats noodles with the tribe’s experiments in chive garnishes and boiled onion ginger while the rest of you settle into a lunch of dumplings.</p><p>Katara shows you the best way to crack open bone while Aang looks on, half-awkwardly, but understandingly. All life is sacred, but in the tundra, choices are expensive.</p><p>At the mealtimes, the four of you mingle not just with the leaders and the master benders, but a whole range of members from the tribe. The children seem evenly split between finding your face fascinating or terrifying. As you have for the last couple of years, you elect to mostly ignore them.</p><p>Whether it’s the communal mealtimes or the regular sparring or the natural progression of weeks spent in each other’s pockets, a sense of – belonging? satisfaction? – peace slowly settles and shifts into a more secure position, a wayward ship protected against a storm. You teach Sokka what you remember about sword fighting. Katara progresses at an almost terrifying rate under Master Pakku’s tutelage, pressing you in practice more and more by the day. Aang coaxes you into chasing after snowballs.</p><p>It’s almost like having Lu Ten around again. Like being at a beach, wet sand caked against your legs and the hem of your shirt, and your mother accepting every shell your tiny hands deposit in her lap. It’s like picking up swords for the first time and finding something you’re <em>good</em> at, for that one exhilarating moment before your father reminds you that you’re a bender first and foremost. How long has it been?</p><hr/><p>One morning, as you sit on a roof to greet Agni’s rise, Katara and Aang already departed for their lessons with Master Pakku, a hyena antelope folds its long legs into sitting besides you. Yanked out of your meditation, you glance over at the incongruous visitor.</p><p>“Settling in?” it asks with a high-pitched warble.</p><p>Instead of answering the spirit, you ask, “What’s with the sudden variety?”</p><p>“Good to hear,” it says and grinds your eardrums. Your jaw aches.</p><p>Pale, milky white eyes gaze out unblinking. In this state of affairs, you’re not going to get any chance today to revel in the short hours of the sun’s presence. Your well of patience had never been deep and lately it’s been even drier. “Well?” you prod.</p><p>Still staring away from you, the spirit stands back up and shakes its shaggy fur. It instructs, “Remember your task.”</p><p>The spirit disappears.</p><p>“Thank you all, oh so much,” you say to the empty air.</p><hr/><p>You don’t realize what’s happening – what the darkened skies and water mean, what the smell of something smothered and sharp in the air signals – until the war horns sound and the drums echo through the city. The people around you become a riptide of movement surging towards the city center. Parents peel off, shouting for their children. Teenagers dash ahead. The throng single-mindedly pushes you along with it, its hearts a quickening staccato layered over the deep booms still rolling down the canals.</p><p>A shadow passes overhead. You glance up to Appa speeding in the same direction as everyone else. A shout: “What’s happening?” <em>What’s happening, what’s happening?</em></p><p>A sharp voice rises in answer, a woman clutching a baby to her chest, “What do you <em>think</em> is happening? <em>The Fire Nation’s coming.</em>”</p><p>You need to move faster, get out from the oppressive squeeze of the frightened beast of a mob. With a leap and a few scrambling kicks against walls, you clamber your way onto the roofs and take off at an unencumbered sprint.</p><p>You arrive at the great hall as the last of the warriors stream in. Katara sees you first as you make your way towards the bright spot of Aang gripping his glider staff. As the chief stands up to speak, you ask them and a just arrived Sokka in a whisper, “How many ships are coming?”</p><p>“A lot,” a preoccupied Sokka replies.</p><p>Before any of you can do more than glance at him, Chief Arnook begins speaking. “A dangerous mission,” he says. “Many of you will not return,” he says.</p><p>Sokka stands.</p><p>As the men leave, Chief Arnook asks you to stay behind a moment. Master Pakku stands at his side, still with whatever problem he has with you slung across his shoulders. The chief says, “You are young, but is there anything you know that could help us?”</p><p>You can only shake your head in the negative. You explain, “I left the Fire Nation before I was of age for conscription. I never went to any of the officer academies.”</p><p>They accept your words with cold resolve and understanding. Chief Arnook says, “It’s been many years since the last time the Fire Nation attacked. Few still remember in living memory.”</p><p><em>Yeah, and between that and your isolation, many in the Earth Kingdom are convinced you were decimated</em>, you do not say to him. Master Pakku watches you as if he knows what’s on your mind anyways. Tense as you always are under his assessing gaze, your wary eyes never stray from keeping his hands and feet in the corner of your vision. If he wants to start trouble with you as soot coats the ground in an even layer, you’ll take him on.</p><p>The chief breaks off your standoff by saying, “Let us join the Avatar.”</p><hr/><p>In this fight, you’re painfully limited in what you can do. Ships keep appearing on the horizon and boulders keep hurtling through the air. Where the Fire Nation keeps finding stones so large and how they’re storing them in the limited space of their ships is completely beyond you. The only time you ever set foot on a navy ship, you spent most of the time drifting in and out of consciousness or forced into chores below deck. Yanking away the flames and heat doesn’t negate the unrelenting weight of several tons of stone. Water douses flame easily enough without you there.</p><p>So instead, you’re forced into the madding scramble to check over supplies while the vibration of artillery jars up your legs and through the Blue Spirit mask you hang at your hip, yanked out of your bag for the first time in weeks.</p><p>You growl over the squeak of the whetstones, “Is there <em>anything</em> I can –”</p><p>“The ships are still too far out,” Sokka reminds you again. “Only waterbenders for now.”</p><p>The ground shakes once more at the same moment a frustrated grumble lodges in your throat. At the Northern Air Temple, it had been one thing to freeze up momentarily. But here, somehow, there’s a liquid fire in your veins and agitating your nerves. <em>Threat, threat, remove the threat</em>, your adrenaline seems to say to you. <em>Fight them off, the forest burners, the blood-stained spears, the fanged fire</em>.</p><p>This siege feels like a slap in the face, a stark reminder of the lengths your father and his father and his father before him go for world dominion.</p><p><em>Fight them off, fight them off,</em> your blood murmurs. <em>Protect the – </em></p><hr/><p>Night falls. The bombardment halts.</p><p>“Where’s Yue?” Sokka asks, the moment he finds you restlessly assisting one of the civilian shelters in the early pre-dawn hours. You gave up on sleeping after a few hours of constantly blinking back awake and staring uselessly at the ceiling above you.</p><p>“Princess Yue?” You glance around the room but all you receive are shrugs. “I don’t know.”</p><p>“No way, you always know where she is,” he counters. “You’re always magically in another room when she appears.”</p><p>“<em>Uh</em>.”</p><p>His foot taps expectantly upon the ground.</p><p>“Okay, fine,” you relent and set down the furs gathered in your arms. “Let’s go find Princess Yue.”</p><p>Sokka follows you out of the building and waits for you to orient yourself and take off down the street. Nighttime in the North Pole casts everything in shades of blue. “Why are you looking for her anyways?” you aks. “Aren’t you part of a mission?”</p><p>“The mission, right. That mission. I’m not on it anymore.” Some grumbles you don’t hear clearly about some asshole. “Chief Arnook gave me a special mission. Guard Princess Yue.”</p><p>“You sure?” you can’t help asking.</p><p>“Yes, he told me himself,” says Sokka, affronted.</p><p>“Hmm.”</p><p>The ever-present hum along your spine leads you to a small round wooden door. A tug opens the door easily and you almost fall on your ass at the suddenly unleashed onslaught of warmth and something solidly otherworldly.</p><p>Sokka grabs your arm, stabilizing your staggering body and drags you through what feels like a threshold to the <em>spirit realm</em>. He calls out, “Princess Yue. Katara. Hey Aang.”</p><p>“Sokka, Blue Spirit, why are you two here?” his sister asks.</p><p>“The chief asked me to look after Yue.”</p><p>You feel almost <em>drunk</em>. You slur, “What <em>is</em> this place?”</p><p>All eyes land on you, including Aang sitting on the <em>grass</em>.</p><p>“It’s the center of the North Pole’s spiritual energy.” Princess Yue explains. “Aang’s trying to cross over to the spirit world.”</p><p>At your dubious expression, Aang says, “The spirits might have advice on how to counter the Fire Nation.”</p><p>You unsteadily sink to the ground. “Sure.” You blink rapidly. “You do that.”</p><p>“Are you okay?”</p><p>“Just … give me a few moments to adjust.”</p><p>You felt something like this before, on the edges of your memory. There was an orange sky. And a seven-fingered hand made of needles. You breathe in deep to prove you still have lungs. When your limbs finally feel like they’re in the right place again and all your organs are accounted for, you look up to Aang glowing. What.</p><p>You wave one hand in his general direction.</p><p>“He’s in the spirit world,” says Katara.</p><p>The glowing is <em>supposed</em> to happen?</p><p>And that’s when the sun rises.</p><hr/><p>You yank on one of the ribbons on your mask again and again. Protect Aang and Yue or fight outside? Protect Aang and Yue or fight outside? Thin trails of smoke rise to the sky then dissipate. The shouts and blasts of battle bounce in muffled waves. <em>Fight</em>, urges the pacing energy in your bones. <em>Protect</em>, tugs the shimmer in your blood. <em>Fight. Protect.</em></p><p>There’s no hiding the barbed edge in your voice when you ask, “How long is he going to be in the spirit world?”</p><p>“Don’t know,” Katara admits.</p><p>Augh. You flop back onto the grass, the warring urges yanking and shoving at you. Go or stay. Movement or stillness. Through gritted teeth, you say, “I didn’t catch it earlier. Who’s he looking for in the spirit world? Any spirit?”</p><p>She and Sokka fidget at the sound of another explosion washing upon the oasis. She says, “The moon and ocean spirit.”</p><p>You squint at her in disbelief. “The – why’s he in the spirit world then?”</p><p>“We don’t know where they are. They’re probably there.”</p><p>Now you turn your disbelief upon Yue. Sitting up, you set your mask on the ground by your hip. “They’re <em>not</em> in the spirit world. How did you not know that? Can’t you feel them?”</p><p>“Blue Spirit, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”</p><p><em>The princess doesn’t know what you’re </em>– You stagger to your feet. You wobble and say, “Call him back. <em>Call him back</em>, how can you not feel them, he doesn’t need to go searching anywhere. There’s <em>no time</em>.”</p><p>“We don’t know how to call him back,” says Sokka, though he does make a valiant attempt of grabbing Aang by his shoulders and shaking him while shouting, “Aang. <em>Aang!</em>” Momo gets in on the action and screeches too while clinging to Aang’s head.</p><p>You almost topple into the water. Fervent, you say, “I felt them since I got here. I thought you all knew, and just weren’t mentioning anything.”</p><p>Your bone marrow reaches a fever pitch as Princess Yue draws up to stand beside you. You throw a loose gesture at the water, at the crushing sensation of ocean surf grinding away stone, at the cold suffocation of space, at the <em>moon and ocean spirit</em>.</p><p>“The <em>fish</em>?” Sokka sputters, aghast.</p><p>“You really are part spirit,” Katara muses.</p><p>As one, the others turn towards Aang, radiating almost flustered concern. You stand with your limbs locked against competing urges electrifying your body from head to toe. Fight or protect. Stay or go.</p><hr/><p>The sun sets and the sound of battle nears. You yank your mask on – “I don’t want the Fire Nation seeing my face” – and are <em>this close</em> to coming apart at the seams with the need to do something besides drive Katara nuts with your pacing all afternoon. Just as Katara yells at you, “Do some headstands or something, I don’t know,” Aang comes back in a flash of blue light.</p><p>“The spirits are the koi,” he announces and leaps to his feet.</p><p>“We’re finally all on the same page,” you say, snappish. “About time, let’s<em> go</em>.”</p><p>“No, they’re in danger. Someone wants to kill them,” Aang earnestly says.</p><p>Kill the spirits? You stare at him. “Who?”</p><p>The door to the oasis crashes open.</p><p>“Well, if it isn’t the Avatar and the Blue Spirit.” Admiral Zhao’s smirk sits like a snarl. A small squad of four soldiers fan out behind them. The cloying tranquility of the oasis sinks and sours into an agitated air, like a trapped predator ready to lash out. “No bother. You won’t be able to stop me.”</p><p><em>Finally</em>, howls the blood in your veins, the fluid between your organs. <em>A FIGHT.</em></p><p>Your swords sing as they come out of their sheath. Your fire crackles with laughter. A fight? He wants a fight? You’ll give him a fight, you’ll take him to pieces, you’ll crumble him into <em>ash</em>.</p><p>Ice and water smashes against armor at Katara’s command. A gust of air slams a body into an ice wall. A soldier gets in your way, deflecting your fire. Incensed, you knock him into Sokka’s waiting boomerang with a one-two kick of fire to the chest. Another soldier immediately flings fire at your face with his fists. He punches towards your shoulder. You duck and roll past his retracting arm. Springing back up at his side, two sweeps of fire snap off your blades and blast him away.</p><p>Where is Zhao, where did he go?</p><p>The frenzy within you erupts. He’s kneeling by the pool; he’s plunging his hand into the water while his soldiers fight as distraction. He raises a bag in his fist and –</p><p>you</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>come</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>A  P  A  R  T</em>
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          <p>I can’t believe I just realized I missed a chance to talk about waste disposal and opium in Ba Sing Se. Thoughts for future me.</p><p>
  <s>we are so close to Iroh, I am screaming here</s>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>Katara has absolutely none of your inhibitions and stands up in arms with her ice hanging by the flick of her wrists. “What do you want?” she asks, raw and crackling with snapping ice, with the smashed in walls of the Northern Water Tribe.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Peace, please,” General Iroh implores.</i>
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          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Finally, all the scenes I wished I could have in chapter six. </p><p>Same as last chapter, best effects if you have creator skins turned on. If this chapter has any more typos, so be it. AO3 hates my guts for using this much CSS, the "edit chapter" button is now cursed.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
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  <p>She says his name as you and I watch. We are observers of a life that is two part ours and two parts not; in conscious decisions of the curling tongue and in the weight of our hands pressed into our minds bearing the invasive tidings of what we’ve learned; this is a portrait for our inspection.</p>
  <p>She says his name as you and I watch. The boy sets down his knife. He steps into her embrace and she feeds him a meal of pale flesh and shining scales, of golden liquor and heated flame, of crowns and jewels and bones and blood, of jade and coral, of the meal of lives once more undone.</p>
  <p>And shall you and I set a course for the sunless desert and the moonless sea and the airless heavens underground beneath our feet as we tear it all asunder, assured in the conquering might of our technologies, that the land that feeds us and the waters that births us and the air that consumes us and the flames that set us down for that last final sleep can all in their universal turns be surmounted by the virtue of cunning and development? What stories we’ve crafted for ourselves, of our abilities and rights, of freedoms from and contracts to the laws set forth in the hum of the exploding star; that delusion that us as the blind man can wrench the world and the spirits to our advantage, as if what we call good cannot exist without what we call bad, as if good and bad exist at all.</p>
  <p>She says his name as you and I watch the forgotten son struggle out of the dirt and clutch at the stone in his heart of what his parents taught him and what the birds shadowing his travels have expressed and what the bears slain under his hands have conveyed.</p>
  <p>Do you hear his name?</p>
  <p>Listen, she says it again, can you hear it? In the swing of the blade, in the rising bread, in the blinding heat of that sun rising unchained in the chase for the spirit-slayer, the murderer, the thief, the forest-burner, the he-must-die-he-must-die-for-this-crime.</p>
  <p>She says his name as you and I watch.</p>
  <p>Did you hear it? Did you hear what it was?</p>
</div><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>and your father’s man once again barely dodges away from your wrath curdled in your veins and threaded through the ice exploding into steam with harsh cracks. The air writhes in your grip and your breath blooms into the coils of dead beasts between the fangs of your wooden snarl.</p><p>He lashes out, predictably, over reliant on the brute force of strength, but you are the flameless heat chasing his footholds and melting ice beneath his feet. You are the unbroken stone of land you do not call home but that had sheltered you regardless in its firm hold. You are the sword bearing spirit of shadow and flame, born upon the plains of the Spirit World to the cries of a forlorn wish seeking aid.</p><p>
  <span class="small">
    <em>Do you not wield their name?</em>
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</p><p>Battle fills the city around you in lashes of water and ice against fire. Occasional explosions of superheated air echo down the canals.</p><p>You blast the admiral off a ledge with a sweeping kick of fire.</p><p>The blue water shimmers and glitters in irate waves under the intense quicksilver of the moonlight. The very forces of the world come to the defense because there is a gift to protect, there is a cruel gift that rages against its threats. Men and armor shatter into shards upon crashing to the ground at the bottom of a fall off the tall, terraced walls. There are animals screaming in terror.</p><p>None of that matters. The retreating bodies, the whips of fire and water, the copper-slick chaos and the sharp smell of charred flesh, none of that matters. You chase your quarry.</p><p>A punch, another, one more, the fourth overwhelms him and sends him onto his back. A sword in your hand flashes down, slashing off half a sleeve as he rolls desperately away. You hiss in irritation.</p><p></p><div class="leftColumn">
  <p>
    <span class="small">
      <em>Aaah, majestic! Are you not exhilarated? Does your blood not sing? Do your bones not cry out at your enemy’s struggle? A fair fight for your honor, wasn’t that what you wanted?</em>
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</div><p>Fire from his feet rockets him a couple feet away, enough to put some space between him and your starving blades. He dives behind rubble made of ice. One kick melts away his cover. He shouts and soldiers that are either brave or foolish block your advancement.</p><p>The first to rush you doesn’t fight you with fire. Their halberd twists and jabs, hunting for your exposed neck and your unarmored chest. Before you can intercept their reach and snap their weapon in half, the second soldier lashes out with bolts of flame. Admiral Zhao begins his retreat. Oh, no he doesn’t.</p><p>Loose hair swings into your eyes as you turn a tight whirl to knock the firebender off their feet. The halberd goes up in flames next, the smoke stinging your eyes. The soldier drops the heated metal and blocks your fists the best they can with their armored forearms. Doesn’t block the fire erupting from your mouth. Your swords flash back into your hands. The chase resumes.</p><p></p><div class="leftColumn">
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      <em>In the old days, there was the sun, aah, his glorious, majestic might! We paid him his honors, to his majesty, but in the old days, not much younger, there was the molten core, the liquid rock. We draw our flames from the paler fire.</em>
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</div><p>A spear of ice snatches the admiral and thrusts him into the air. He shouts, the ice flaring orange and red as he fights against the waterbender’s clenched tight hold upon the liquid element. But the night’s dragged on, the sun long set, and the full moon shines above, resplendent and enraged.</p><p>You crash onto the jut of ice. Your added heat proves too much and the ice sluices back into water as the waterbender leaves him to your mercy and takes care of the approaching Fire Nation soldiers instead. Admiral Zhao falls into a tumble, breathing deep, but still controlled. Steady as his breath control may be, his flames begin shivering with wild fear. He calls forth a giant wall of fire.</p><p></p><div class="leftColumn">
  <p>
    <span class="small">
      <em>And this year, what a majestic year! From the heavens, a scream of fire. From the heavens, a suffocation of fire. Reclaim your name, if you insist, but we suggest holding off. The price of your name is our fire. </em>
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</div><p>“Who the hell <em>are</em> you?” Admiral Zhao yells.</p><p>You drop to all fours, the better to launch yourself at him with bolts of malevolent flame, snarling so he can see all your fangs. Your hair streams out behind you, long undone from its knot. A kick, a punch, he goes tumbling across a bridge.</p><p>
  <span class="small">
    <em>Where did your hair tie go?</em>
  </span>
</p><p>“<strong>I? Who am I?</strong>” There’s fire in your throat. “<strong>I am the Banished. I am the Unnamed. I am your Lord of flame.</strong>”</p><p>
  <span class="small">
    <em>Where did your swords go?</em>
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</p><p>“What kind of spirit –” he starts to say, but you cut him off with swift punches and he leaps over the bridge to the walkway along the canal below.</p><p></p><div class="wrong">
  <p>“<strong>WRONG.</strong>”</p>
</div><p>There are other skull faced soldiers below. No matter. The flames come to your call.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>You come out of a tumble on top of a wall.</p><p>
  <span class="small">
    <em>How? When? Where’s the canal?</em>
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</p><p> </p><p>There’s a man in front of you with frazzled hair and groaning bodies behind you. In the full moon’s light, there’s a terror in his eyes. His mouth says words. Recognition.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“<strong>CORRECT.</strong>”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  
</p><hr/><p>Someone’s shaking your shoulder and if it wasn’t for every one of your muscles feeling like you scraped them against one of Ahn’s graters, you’d have smacked the hand away already, or worse. There’s a faint voice, saying –</p><p>You crack open one eye by a sliver, then squeeze it back shut against the sharp sunlight reflecting off ice.</p><p>“Sokka,” you mumble. “Let go.”</p><p>“Blue Spirit, you’re finally awake!” He does not let go and in fact, spurring a startled noise out of your bruised lungs, he scoops you up from the ice and starts running.</p><p>“What – Sokka?” You open your eyes again, slowly and try taking in the surroundings as best you can despite the fur smushed against your face and the general gangly bumpiness of his stride. Teams of waterbenders here and there guide ice into patch jobs over holes blown into buildings. If you narrow your eyes against the glare, you think you see one of the city’s outer walls slowly stitching itself together, like a healing wound, around the hole blown into a good third of its width. You can’t find any Fire Nation soldiers. No tanks, no battleships.</p><p>Without paying much heed to any of your confused noises, Sokka says over your head, “Aang already woke up several hours ago and I think he’s helping the rebuilding teams. Katara’s with the healers, she wants to see you immediately.”</p><p>You frown at your left hand as it shakes when you lift it, and as much as your muscles and your very bones burn with the movement, you weakly smack your hand against his chest a few times to get his attention. “We won?”</p><p>“Yeah, we won. Hang on, buddy, we’re almost there. Katara! <em>Katara!</em>”</p><p>Good.</p><p>You close your eyes.</p><hr/><p>You wake up in a dim room with Aang sitting beside your thin mattress, his hands clenching and unclenching in the fur lining the floor.</p><p>“Hey,” you try saying, but cough instead.</p><p>He holds a small bowl out to you. “Here, drink this.”</p><p>“Thanks,” you rasp and sit up to take the water. A moment’s thought heats the liquid so light whisps of steam curl up from its surface. You drink.</p><p>“How are you feeling?” he asks.</p><p>“Like hell.” You set the drained bowl on the floor and collapse back down with a wince. “Like I pulled every muscle.”</p><p>“Do you want your hair tie?” he offers.</p><p>Your lift your head from the mattress enough so that when you shake your head you can see how much of a mess your hair is now without having to lift your hands. The strands that fall into your face are a tangled mess, but you’re not going to deal with cleaning up all <em>that</em> yet. “Thanks, but no,” you say, “If I lift my hands high enough to fix my hair, I think my arms will just fall off.”</p><p>That gets a small smile out of him. But the smile doesn’t last long. He fidgets and glances towards the room’s door. After a stilted moment, he says, “It’s been a couple of days since the attack. The Fire Nation doesn’t seem to be coming back. So, we’ll be leaving soon.”</p><p>“How soon?”</p><p>“A couple days.”</p><p>You hum and lever yourself back up with gritted teeth. Aang’s hands brace you and he doesn’t push you back down as he asks, “Should you be getting up?”</p><p>“I need to stretch,” you explain. “That should help with the soreness. Ugh, what <em>happened</em> to me?”</p><p>He blinks at you in surprise as you pull your legs into a split and lean over until your hands wrap around your right foot. Your chest and arms burn, and everything shakes. It all hurts as you expect.</p><p>“You don’t remember?” Aang asks.</p><p>Of course, you remember. Admiral Zhao showed up like an asshole with a whole armada to take down the Northern Water Tribe and then he even rolled right up into the spiritual sanctuary of this place. As galling as it was, he got past you all and managed to scoop up the moon spirit, who was a <em>koi</em> this whole time, and then –</p><p>And then.</p><p>And then?</p><p>“I remember Zhao,” you say. “I remember Zhao showing up at the oasis. But then… What happened to him? How did we beat the navy?”</p><p>He frowns at the ground before you, with a rarely seen seriousness, and admits, “I don’t entirely know. Katara, Sokka, and Yue nearly got ambushed and hit from the back by a bunch of soldiers. Then I went into the Avatar State and you’d already chased Zhao away. By the time I came out of it, the battle was basically done.”</p><p>Slowly, you switch over to your left foot. Uh, okay then.</p><p>“How many are dead?” you ask and then instantly regret.</p><p>In the small voice of the twelve-year-old he is, a twelve-year-old suddenly thrust into a war without the lifelong preparation any other twelve-year-old gets, he says, “I don’t know.”</p><hr/><p>Once she’s satisfied you won’t keel over if you try walking more than three feet, Katara drags you over to Healer Yugoda. With the business-like professionality of a master at her trade, Yugoda orders you to strip down to your smallclothes and dumps you into a pool of barely lukewarm water.</p><p>“Can I heat this up?” you ask.</p><p>“No,” she tells you firmly, and sets the pool faintly glowing with Katara hovering on the side.</p><p>Deciding with your limited sense of self-preservation to not distract the healer at her work, you say to Katara instead, “Aang wasn’t able to tell me much about what happened to Zhao. Do you have any idea?”</p><p>She shakes her head. “You?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“No one seems to know. You were chasing him one moment, and then he was gone,” she says. You focus on the shifting light across her face instead of how you can feel every uncomfortable push and pull of Yugoda’s inspection.</p><p>“Great,” you say and thump your head against the rim of the pool. “Great,” you say again as even a master such as Yugoda admits defeat in the face of your weird body. “Just great.”</p><p>“You’ll have to heal the old-fashioned way,” Healer Yugoda says. She lists off your injuries: “Many of your muscles are strained. Your left arm and your legs were almost fractured. The cuts across your shoulders and chest are healing well, but I still want someone to check them everyday for infection. You <em>must</em> rest.”</p><p>Silently, you nod. She finally releases you from the water. Katara props you up upon her shoulder and slings an arm across your back as she guides your stumbling feet back to the room given to your group. You collapse onto your sleeping mat and you absolutely don’t wheeze when Momo lands on your chest, chittering.</p><hr/><p>You’re concentrating so hard on forcing your lungs to work, to <em>breathe</em>, that you don’t hear the approaching footsteps or the curtain to the room swinging aside.</p><p>“Blue Spirit, I brought more – <em>Blue Spirit, stop doing push-ups</em>, you’re supposed to <em>rest</em>,” Katara exclaims, exasperated.</p><p>Mulishly, you roll out of your plank position and swipe a hand against the sweat on your brow. “I did rest.”</p><p>“<em>Keep</em> resting.”</p><p>Sokka and Aang then Princess Yue trail in after her, all bearing platters. The one in Aang’s hands is even steaming. You pull yourself upright and out of the way. <em>Where</em> the Northern Tribe got their hands on snap-ginger, you have <em>no</em> idea, but if your nose is correct, they did. Aang passes you a bowl of braised cabbage and shiitake seasoned with snap-ginger all heaped over noodles. The noise that comes out of you sounds like a small cat sighting a bird for the first time in its life and you instantly flush in mortification. They all laugh at you, the traitors.</p><p>Predictably, Sokka came bearing a plate of jerky, most of which disappears into his gut over the course of the meal. Katara preoccupies herself with popping tiny, pickled fish into her mouth one after another and wards off every one of your attempts to grab more of the stuffed squid. Definitely seeking revenge for your continuous disregard of the healers’ plaintive instructions, she tells you, “That’s too heavy for you.”</p><p>“No, it’s <em>not</em>.”</p><p>“Ah, ah, <em>ah</em>, which of us here has actual healing training?”</p><p>“Yeah, Blue Spirit, its nature is too <em>hot</em> for you,” Sokka says around a mouthful of meat. You deeply regret ever trying to explain the different medicinal natures of food to him in a misguided attempt to turn his flailing at Princess Yue into something less mortifying to watch. If he’s going to jokingly call himself a prince, he better act more like one, you’d thought. Big mistake.</p><p>You squawk, “Its nature is <em>not</em> too hot. You’re completely misinterpreting everything.”</p><p>He waves in dismissal and Yue laughs behind a daintily raised hand. “Eat your healing noodles.”</p><p>Huffing, you do. Katara shoves another cup of tea made from some sweet mixture of dried berries and crushed flowers you’ve never seen before at your face.</p><hr/><p>On the final day before your departure on the ships heading towards the South Pole that will be dropping Aang and you all off at the southern half of the Earth Kingdom, Princess Yue corners you into a discussion you’ve been actively avoiding. Unfortunately, you’re still not quite able to run and she easily overtakes your stiff walking stride.</p><p>“I want to thank you for preventing Admiral Zhao from causing immeasurable harm to the world,” she says, having shooed everyone else out of the room.</p><p>Your right shoulder scrunches up. The cuts there are almost completely healed. “Aang and the others wouldn’t let him either,” you deflect. “You don’t need to thank me.”</p><p>“Regardless, it was your actions that allowed them to disarm the other soldiers,” she presses on. Well, that’s interesting to know. After days of digging at your memories, you still barely remember the events of that night, never mind what the others were doing. The sheer need to take down and <em>remove</em> Zhao’s threat commanded all your attention and buried all other thoughts under a mudslide. The whole night’s a confusing blur to you.</p><p>But you insist, “Princess Yue, I cannot accept your thanks.”</p><p>She sighs and her hands fold on top of each other, tense. Carefully and precisely, she says, “Had Zhao succeeded in his plot to kill the moon spirit, many more would be dead.” Her blue eyes lock onto yours. “Water Tribe <em>and</em> Fire Nation.”</p><p>You swallow and your voice rasps, “They shouldn’t have died in the first place. The Fire Nation had no right coming here. This war shouldn’t even be fought; it’s <em>wrong</em>.”</p><p>Her posture softens. With a soft smile, she says, “Then I’m glad you’re helping Avatar Aang restore balance and bring peace.”</p><p>Bereft of words, you nod and look away, released from the intensity of the sky deep hum of her presence.</p><p>Yue allows your silence and fills it by saying, “When the war is over, I look forward to us meeting again. Not merely because of our duties to our people, but as friends.”</p><p>“Not many duties for me to deal with,” you say. “I’m banished.”</p><p>“Surely once your father is removed from the throne, you can rescind your banishment?”</p><p>Choking, your head turns to face her so fast you almost pull something in your neck. Your heart slams against the walls of your chest in an attempt to escape your body; you can feel your heartbeat in your fingers, in the rush of blood in your ears. Coughing and hacking, you stare at her, panicked, while trying to convince your lungs you’re not drowning in your spit.</p><p>Wide-eyed herself, Princess Yue unconsciously lifts her hands in defense, and in the first time you’ve seen her truly flustered, she stammers, “My apologies, I didn’t mean to scare you like that. Am – am I wrong? I’m so sorry.”</p><p>“No –” you cough one last time. “No – I – no, it’s – why’d you say that? How’d you <em>know</em>?”</p><p>She’s too refined to shift uneasily on her feet as she blinks and explains, “Master Pakku told my father and me after your first week here. He’d suspected since you arrived, but it took him time to confirm his suspicions.”</p><p>“None of you ever said anything,” you say, bewildered.</p><p>“Aang and you yourself never introduced yourself as a prince, so we followed your lead. Do they not know?”</p><p>“<em>No</em>.” You haven’t been referred to as a prince in well over two years – almost three, you realize with a further jolt that heaps more abuse upon your heart. And with the matter of your name and your banishment, you have no idea if the ministries haven’t struck you from the royal family yet. You hope they haven’t, but they probably have. In which case, you <em>aren’t</em> a prince.</p><p>This conversation clearly going nowhere she expected, Princess Yue blinks, then visibly settles herself. She counsels, “You should tell them.”</p><p>“Bit awkward. ‘Hey, Aang. My great-grandfather murdered all the airbenders because he was scared of you.’ Not something really, um,” you hedge then sprint back to the topic before this whole mess, “But yeah. I’d, I’d like to see you again. After the war. Sorry I’ve been avoiding you. It’s just, uh.”</p><p>But she smiles in understanding, somehow. “No worries. I’m glad we can meet again.”</p><hr/><p>Every morning, you give thanks to Agni, and Tui and La too, you guess, that you don’t get seasick. There isn’t nearly enough space on the boats, far smaller than any Fire Nation navy ship, for that kind of misery.</p><p>The spirits give you a different kind of misery: paranoia.</p><p>No one’s willing to let you practice firebending on the wooden vessel, so when you’re not running through rusty cold katas, watching Master Pakku judgmentally for not <em>saying anything</em>, sparring with Sokka, or assisting with chores, you exist in a state of high tension, waiting for the foxes to return. Your stress only gets worse as your injuries from the siege finally completely heal and you’re trapped on board with even more restless energy you can’t burn.</p><p>One day, when the currents and winds are slow, Katara jettisons you off the ship and refuses to throw you a rope until you swim your agitation off. No one lets you fish after the disaster of your first few attempts.</p><p>After two weeks at sea, the spirits still don’t appear. Taking advantage of your lack of concentration, Sokka ekes out a lead in your sparring matches, which is how you know you’re in a really appalling state.</p><hr/><p>You don’t even realize you’re opening and closing your mouth again with a grimace until Katara catches you in the act and asks, concerned, “Is your jaw okay?”</p><p>“Yeah, just –” you run your tongue against the edge of your teeth again. “Mouth feels weird.”</p><p>“Weird how?”</p><p>You already looked a mirror, but nothing’s out of place: a set of normal human teeth. “Just weird,” you say.</p><p>Her concern begins shifting into exasperation, drawing out your reluctant, “Feels like I should have fangs.”</p><p>All exasperation evaporates from Katara’s expression. After a beat, she says, “Fangs.”</p><p>Maybe if you don’t verbally confirm it, you can stop thinking about it.</p><p>“I see,” Katara says with inexplicable realization. She pushes, “Like your mask?”</p><p>You barely nod.</p><p>All she gives you though, is a single, “Huh.”</p><hr/><p>The ship makes regular surreptitious stops along the coast for more food for Appa and Aang, since even with the bent ice in the storeroom below deck, the fresh vegetables and hay don’t last long. The rest of you subside on seafood, seafood, and more seafood.</p><p>On a day with fairer weather, you head onto the deck with your bowl of rice, fried bean sprouts and greens, and lightly sheered fish. The voices of a group of men resting up front at the bow drift back towards you. Just as you bite into a piece of bok choy, a clicking sound against wood approaches.</p><p>You glance to your right. Three of the cat’s eyes blink while it licks its seven-clawed paw and washes its ear.</p><p>“Some fish, please,” it rumbles.</p><p>Silently, you pick out the largest piece and hold it out towards the spirit with your chopsticks. The fish disappears in one purring gulp. Its long tongue licks its other paw, and it grooms its whiskers.</p><p>“Well. You have had some excitement haven’t You?” it says.</p><p>“What happened to the foxes?” you ask.</p><p>It smiles. There are too many fangs for its mouth. It answers, “They do not enjoy the water. Nor does the water enjoy them. We are surprised, you have done well.”</p><p>You stab your chopsticks into the remaining rice so they won’t go rolling off and set your bowl down beside you. Wary of the spirit’s many teeth and claws, along with their general propensity to shoving you over a cliff, you ask, “I completed a task for all the elements now. The Eastern Air Temple, the phoenix stamp, Ba Sing Se, the North Pole. Is there…”</p><p>“More? No.” Its smile shifts into something malicious and its purple-blue eyes drift towards the sky. “Agni and Tui petitioned on You’s behalf. No more.”</p><p><em>Oh</em>. You decide to freak out appropriately over this fact at a later moment, while the spirit isn’t glaring at everything around it. “Then, my name?”</p><p>The spirit stops wishing death upon the sun and tilts its head back towards you. “We are not appropriate,” it says. “We are only messengers. Soon. But not us.”</p><p>Of course. Rubbing a hand over your face does little towards alleviating the rigid strain within your spine. You ask instead because it’s been on all your minds, “What happened to Zhao? What happened to <em>me</em>?”</p><p>“Hmm? Oh, <em>that</em> one. Merely what he requested: justice for his actions.” The cat leers. “We let Agni handle that fool himself. After all, he insisted it was <em>his</em> family that was threatened.” Haughtily, it says, “We had our own ideas,” then its shoulders shrug in a wave of <em>what can you do</em>.</p><p>“As for You? Merely what you were ordered: protect the gift with everything You had, protect the gift with everything You had not. Really, well done,” it grudgingly says. “Hold onto the mask. We will need it.”</p><p>Its tails sweep across the deck’s wooden planks and after stealing the rest of your fish, it disappears. You shovel down your lunch as fast as you can and go sprinting below deck to find someone you can scream insensibly at. <em>Agni and Tui?</em></p><hr/><p>“You’ve been out of it today,” Sokka notices. “Is everything fine?”</p><p>“No,” you say simply. “Everything’s not fine.”</p><p>“Well, what is it?” he presses.</p><p>“Nothing you can help with.”</p><hr/><p>When Aang crashes into you due to you abruptly stalling in the middle of camp, Katara puts her foot down. “Something’s been bothering you all day. You can talk to us, you know?”</p><p>Yue’s right, you <em>should</em> tell them who you really are. Aang’s destiny portends his victory over the Fire Lord, which includes somehow dealing with Azula and your uncle too. Sooner, rather than later, you’ll be at a family reunion involving some form of violence. In the middle of a fight is not the time for unveiling a secret like this.</p><p>But you can’t tell them, not today, not on the first anniversary of your banishment you have a calendar on hand to pinpoint the date. You can’t look at their compassion and yank the ground out from under their feet like this while you’re floundering in the waters.</p><p>“Bad memories,” you tell them.</p><p>The voice of your tutor, as he recites, “A nation’s honor follows the lead of its ruler’s honor. A people are only as strong as their leader.” Your father’s shawl on the stone floor. The pungent smell of the infirmary. The rolling of the ship, those confusing first days while your face was one mass of numb pain.</p><p>“Just, bad memories.”</p><p>How can they be so kind? With their own dead families, disappeared into the night? How can they look at you with your failures branded upon your face and set a soft hand upon your wrist, not a trap, but a promise, <em>I’m here, I’m here</em>?</p><p>Aang’s eyes close in sympathy and he says, “I get that. When we got to the Southern Air Temple and I saw…”</p><p>He trails off. Katara’s hand on you twitches and her other arm curves over, pulling him close too. Across from her, Sokka completes the circle, closing the bracket of warmth beside you. They carry the burdens of their own losses upon their backs: a father pulled away by the war, a decimated tribe. He whispers for your benefit, “There were skeletons.”</p><p>Oh.</p><p>You really must tell him. Your family, including you, must face your collective crimes.</p><p>You open your mouth and what comes out instead is: “Before I heard that the Avatar was back, I believed I’d die before the war ended. Or I’d die because the war was ending and everyone would fight more harshly with an end in sight.”</p><p>The campfire flickers with your deep intake of breath. The sun slips under the horizon. “I never, I <em>never</em> thought I’d see my home again,” you choke. “I don’t know if it <em>can</em> be my home again, not after everything I’ve seen, not after these last few years. The Fire Nation’s done so much wrong, so many people are <em>dead</em>.”</p><p>Staring down at the dirt, you can’t see their faces through your blurring vision. “<em>But I miss it so much</em>.”</p><hr/><p>Sokka sees the man first, jumping to his feet with a hand on his boomerang. “Fire Nation military,” he warns.</p><p>You scramble to your feet, swords drawn.</p><p>“Wait,” calls out the man, calls out –</p><p>“I intend you no harm, I just want to talk,” Prince – no, General – Iroh says, hands raised and open-palmed, drawn back where it’ll be awkward to launch into an attack. You don’t trust it, but the others don’t know yet the kinds of tricks your uncle built his fame upon.</p><p>In your shock, your right leg stutters.</p><p>Katara has absolutely none of your inhibitions and stands up in arms with her ice hanging by the flick of her wrists. “What do you want?” she asks, raw and crackling with snapping ice, with the smashed in walls of the Northern Water Tribe.</p><p>“Peace, please,” your uncle implores.</p><p>You swallow and step forward, placing yourself in front of Aang, who sends you startled and confused glances. Sokka opens his mouth, a hand drifting up as a barrier between you and the interloper, but you cut him off before he can speak. “Uncle.”</p><p>Somehow, the tension rockets higher.</p><p>“Nephew,” Iroh says, with something blistered and cracked open in his expression, his eyes drawn unswervingly to your left eye and ear.</p><p>You should bow. You absolutely should bow. You should at least acknowledge him with something more than frozen hands at your sides and tension in every tendon. You <em>need to bow</em>, saying just that, by itself, stuttered and half-choked off, is <em>absolutely disrespectful</em>.</p><p>“Uncle?” Sokka echoes. “That’s your <em>uncle</em>?”</p><p>Aang pulls ashore at your side, with Katara in tow. You stand in a line of four, tensed and braced against the general before you, the undeniable sign of the Fire Nation’s local presence too close to Omashu for your tastes. Too close to <em>you</em> for your tastes. He’s right in front of you, with the undoubtedly full might of the Fire Nation’s army right behind him, and he can grab you right here and now for breaking the terms of your banishment. Nothing you or the others do could stop him from detaining you by force.</p><p>Three years you’ve managed to survive and now you’re looking your end in the face. Not just your end – Aang is here too. One half trained Avatar, one newly minted waterbending master, and two teenagers against Iroh? That’s no contest.</p><p>“He’s General Iroh of the Fire Nation,” you say, since that’s the armor colors he’s wearing, instead of the regiments of a prince, for whatever reason. “The Dragon of the West.”</p><p>Bless your companions’ respective isolation from the mainland fighting when they don’t instantly recognize the royal implications of that title and the likewise implications of your family ties.</p><p>“It’s been a long three years since I last saw you, nephew. Please, let us sit. I am only an old man these days who would like to share some tea,” says Iroh.</p><p>Tea. He wants to – okay, right. This is Uncle Iroh. Of course, he wants to talk over tea. How are you even surprised? At least tea will give you enough extra time to plan an escape.</p><p>He even reaches into a bag at his side, <em>because of course he does</em>, and pulls out a teapot. “I brought my favorite. I hope you all enjoy.” Out comes a small packet of loose leaves and a flask of water.</p><p>This is madness, you have to restore <em>some</em> sense of awareness here. “Uncle, what is there even for us to talk about? The longer we spend here, the more time your men have to surround us.”</p><p>He only calmly continues heating the water. “Then why haven’t you run already?”</p><p>Silence pierces your lungs.</p><p>Iroh says. “If you four have questions, perhaps I can answer them. I promise no harm will come to you in my presence.”</p><p>“What, you’d really give up Fire Nation secrets?” Sokka challenges, but in a state of shock, you sheath your swords and already begin sitting down as your uncle pours out cups of the fragrant tea: jasmine, of course it’s jasmine, how many times has he prepared jasmine tea for your mother, in one of the still moments before he was gone again? She accepted each cup with a gracious smile while Azula resolutely didn’t look at the sweet cake placed precisely in the middle of a glazed bowl upon the thin veins of translucent yellow ginkgo leaves. He read poetry while your mother recited plays and you and your sister exchanged glances, quickly in the corner of your eyes, willing for escape.</p><p>Why haven’t you run? How fast can Appa dodge, how fast can you run, how long can you delay him so Aang, the greater prize, can escape? Not fast enough, not long enough.</p><p>“Perhaps not all,” Iroh says with a smile.</p><p>Despite all your apprehensions, you tell the others, “You can trust him.” <em>You</em>, not <em>we</em>.</p><p>One after another, the three sit, cross-legged, which is when you realize you’d instinctively dropped to sit on your heels, the way you haven’t for a long while. A cup appears before you. In your hands, the heat seeps through the smooth porcelain, the perfect temperature. You drink a single tiny sip, unblinkingly watching your uncle pass a cup to the others in turn.</p><p>Sokka peers suspiciously at his serving, sniffing for poisons probably, which you can tell not to bother with because your uncle would rather burn a thousand bricks of tea to ash before tarnishing a brew with something like poison. Upon seeing that your sip doesn’t immediately knock you to the ground, he takes a larger gulp himself. Katara hums in surprised approval, as does Aang.</p><p>But the cups are only so large and the silent pleasantries only last for so long. Sokka goes straight for the jugular: “How do we defeat the Fire Lord?”</p><p>Thank you Sokka, for letting you know what a heart attack feels like. Then Iroh actually <em>answers</em>, “The Fire Lord is a powerful firebender. Few can match him in an honest duel. It won’t only be him; the Fire Nation’s armed forces all stand at his back.” His gaze shifts to Aang cradling his near empty cup in his hands. “It will take a fully realized Avatar.”</p><p>If you go any tenser, all your muscles will turn into knots. You don’t mean to talk, but the words come out anyways in the question, “Where’s the army right now?”</p><p>Iroh sighs. “As we speak, the Fire Nation is seizing Omashu.”</p><p>“No,” Katara gasps, her hands clasped before her mouth and neck.</p><p>Aang burst up into standing, staff in hand, cup barely set on the ground. “The Fire Nation’s attacking Omashu?”</p><p>“Attacked,” your uncle corrects gravely. “Omashu has already fallen.”</p><p>Why the <em>hell</em> did you say they could trust him. The ground below you rocks like a boat in a storm, or rather, his words shred your balance apart, everything within you kicking into high gear. <em>Omashu has already fallen.</em> “I bet you helped with that, didn’t you,” the wounded beast in your heart snarls. “Couldn’t conquer Ba Sing Se but could conquer the next best prize. What next, ready for another round against your old foe?”</p><p>The tea in your cup sits absolutely forgotten. Iroh’s face shifts in miniscule movements, illegible to you. The two of you weren’t that close, before. He just wasn’t around enough for it and you’d always gravitated more towards Lu Ten. Then, after your cousin died, there’d been those two years or so when Prince Iroh nearly disappeared off the face of the earth. Upon his return, he had a soft spot for you, far as you could tell, but what did that amount to? Your big mouth in a war room, that’s what. You can’t read him like Azula or your mother could.</p><p>“My nephew, no, I didn’t,” he says, low and somber. “The Fire Lord doesn’t trust me with much these days, least of all an important military campaign.”</p><p>Are you dreaming? Is this a nightmare? Sokka shifts forward, his weight sliding between you and Iroh. Aang nudges forward as well, as if they’re – as if they’re <em>blocking</em> Iroh from you, <em>protecting</em> you. Bewildered, you make no move to stop their actions, their defensiveness. You glance to the right, towards Katara. Her attention flicks between you and Iroh with the slight pinch between her brows as she settles upon a decision. Her jaw shifts and that’s a water flask inches from her hand, what is going on here.</p><p>“One last question, and then we’re going,” Sokka says, hard and final, because Aang shimmers with an impatience to <em>go</em> already, to have gone yesterday, to sprint towards Omashu and check on apparently an old friend. “All <em>four</em> of us.”</p><p>“Then in exchange, may I ask a question of my own?”</p><p>“Fine,” says Sokka, crossed arms and all.</p><p>Terrifyingly, Iroh’s attention turns completely to you. The Avatar standing before him may as well not exist. The Water Tribe siblings, the ground’s hard rock, the springtime yelling of the birds in the trees, it all may as well not exist. His attention pins you down, battling against your hasty defenses. Just as the walls of Ba Sing Se cracked before him, so do yours. He asks, “Are you well?”</p><p>Incredulous, you bark out a laugh. “Am I <em>well</em>? I’m banished, I’m <em>nameless</em>, the Fire Lord threw me out to <em>die!</em>” Oh, spirits, you never actually said that aloud before. You never allowed the thoughts to fully form before. “Do you know how close I was to completely losing my hearing and vision to the infections? Do you know how close I was to losing my <em>mind</em>?”</p><p>Iroh visibly withdraws. He sighs, “I’m sorry, that was poorly worded on my part. These last few years, I worried for you. You shouldn’t have been forced to leave alone.”</p><p>What are you even supposed to do with that? What does saying those words even change? You look down, squirming away from the iron grip of his expression, and suddenly remind yourself that your now lukewarm tea still exists. Snatching the cup from the ground where you set it at some point, you drink it all in one go, just for something to do.</p><p>Katara slips back into the conversation, reasserting her presence and skipping straight over the family drama you just flung everywhere for everyone to see. “Our question now. Are you going to follow us?”</p><p><em>He hadn’t for the whole last three years</em>, you want to howl. He hadn’t when you stayed in Ba Sing Se for the last year. He hadn’t when it should have been easy for a man with his connections and his resources.</p><p>The hills and mountains close in, traps laying in wait, of exposed valleys and harsh cliffs. If he follows you, the group will have far more trouble than when Zhao chased them. Iroh’s not stupid enough to do things like attempted assassinations on the moon spirit. If he doesn’t follow you – you can’t decide what it’ll mean.</p><p>General Iroh takes in the bristling children between him and you, the great mass of Appa watching at the ready behind you, and the way your hands clench white-knuckled around your cup. His eyes keep tracking over your face, the only tell in his serene posture clad in well-maintained armor. What does he want with you?</p><p>He doesn’t sigh as he says, “No, I will not follow you.”</p><p>He lifts the teapot as if it weighs twenty pounds in a gesture to refill the empty cups. You don’t extend your hand. The teapot hangs in the air, then returns to the ground.</p><p>“And I see I have already dallied you long enough,” he says. “Ah, to be full of such young energy again.” He stands and collects the various cups, a burst of heat drying the lingering liquid. Stiffly, you stand as well. Appa lumbers closer as everyone gets to their feet.</p><p>With his paraphernalia swept back into his bag, Iroh says, “Many trials still await your journeys. In this endless war, it is easy to lose sight of the future. Of what it means to experience peace and to have faith in hope. It is well to live in the present, but I ask of each of you to also consider your roles when the fighting is over. My generation has only brought suffer upon our forebearers and our children. Your generation will bring prosperity.”</p><p>Your limbs hang frozen as if Katara incased you in ice. Your mouth opens and closes. He didn’t just – <em>that’s treason</em>. The Dragon of the West, letting the Avatar go, letting a banished prince go, saying – saying <em>that</em> – that’s treason.</p><p>Sokka jars you out of your shock with a hand on your shoulder, hustling you towards your belongings. You scramble to scoop your swords off the ground, unable to tear your eyes away from your uncle. A whirl of blue bundles you in the middle of a protective barricade, even if a complicated expression sits on your companions’ faces. Katara climbs onto Appa first and extends a hand down, helping her brother into the saddle.</p><p>“Avatar Aang, my nephew,” he calls out. “King Bumi is a friend of mine,” how, when, how does that even make sense, “Quite the skilled Pai Sho player, in fact. Always an interesting opponent.” Okay, the world rights itself again; only your uncle. “He and I both favor an old gambit utilizing the White Lotus tile. You’d be surprised how far such a connection can take you in this world.”</p><p>Even as you shoulder your bag and retreat the few steps towards Appa, you watch him, how even when he grants Aang a slightly strained smile, his body remains oriented towards you. His hands remain tucked in his sleeves, away from your sight. Aang says, with that hopeful air that in a couple days to weeks will spell definitive trouble for you all, “Thank you for the tea. It was really good.”</p><p>Your uncle’s smile shifts into a more genuine stance. “I’m honored,” he says, but his attention no longer lingers upon Aang. His focus bears down hard upon you.</p><p>Prince Iroh’s an aging man; his hair might possibly be graying even more than it was three years ago. The beginning of wrinkles gather at the corners of his eyes.</p><p>Without a word, you turn away and climb onto Appa’s saddle. You don’t look back. After all, what was there even for you to say?</p><hr/><p> </p><p>You look back once, while rising into the sky.</p><p> </p><hr/><p>“So, uh, that was your uncle,” Sokka says several hours later.</p><p>“Yeah,” you blankly say, still shell-shocked, like a boulder smashed into your senses. You feel as bruised as the day after the attack at the north.</p><p>At the other side of the saddle, the third corner of the triangle you three make in the saddle, Katara says, “For a Fire Nation general he doesn’t seem … that bad.”</p><p>“He’s going to get himself killed,” your body says without your permission. “That whole meeting. What he said at the end, he’s going to get himself killed. That’s all treason.”</p><p>You have your head tipped back, watching the whisps of clouds scroll past above in the clear blue sky. But you can see, barely, Sokka and Katara glancing at each other.</p><p>“Isn’t that a good thing?” Sokka asks. “Not the getting killed part. The treason part. Since the Fire Lord’s pretty evil and the world needs all the help it can get?”</p><p>Iroh may oppose his brother, but that still doesn’t change the fact that Iroh laid siege to Ba Sing Se not that long ago. That he nearly conquered Ba Sing Se, if not for Lu Ten and other unspoken shifts on the battleground over the course of that week. That he killed the last dragon and spent most of his life as the crown prince, heir to the Fire Nation’s throne. He spoke of peace, but you can’t figure out what version of peace he envisions.</p><p>It does not escape your notice that he never referred to you as prince. Like Master Pakku and Princess Yue, he took your lead and kept your full familial connections silent. This can’t last.</p><p>In a naked ploy to stop talking about your family, you say, “I heard some rumors the last time I was in Omashu. Is King Bumi really the way they say he is?”</p><p>“Crazy? Absolutely,” Sokka confirms. That’s comforting.</p><hr/><p>Several pressing facts click into place when the messenger hawk lands with a letter signed by a familiar family seal.</p><p>That’s Mai’s younger brother, you realize. Mai has a younger brother. You’ve been banished so long Mai has a younger brother now. It’s been so long –</p><p>“I don’t like this,” you say aloud.</p><p>“Yeah, what if it’s a trap!” Sokka protests. Wait, what?</p><p>“Trap or not, we can’t take a baby with us anyways. Then we’re really kidnapping him,” Aang says, which is how you blink back to awareness and realize the new governor of Omashu is proposing to trade the missing King Bumi for his missing son.</p><p>Katara, still cradling the cooing and drooling toddler, says, “We’ll all go. With Appa, we can get in and out quickly, even if they do try trapping us.”</p><p>She’s right, but for one small problem. “If we’re trying to hide who Aang really is, then it’ll be tricky bringing me along too. Everyone in the Fire Nation army must know that the Blue Spirit travels with the Avatar,” you say. “But I can’t walk in without my mask since my face is …”</p><p>“Kinda unique,” Sokka supplies as you simultaneously say, “Fucked up.”</p><p>The two of you glance at each other and then you shrug. You say, “I’ll come and find somewhere to hide in case things go wrong.”</p><hr/><p>You might have completed your tasks, but obviously the spirits are still conspiring to place you into a state of hell.</p><p><em>Azula</em>. First your uncle, now your sister. Is the Fire Lord also going to suddenly leave his palace and unexpectedly appear to terrorize you? And so much for hoping that the trade will go smoothly.</p><p>Everything quickly goes to hell exactly like you feared it would. You spring from your hiding place in the scaffolding. Landing with a roll, you block Mai’s path to Katara as Azula goes careening off after Aang.</p><p>“Go! Help Sokka. I’ll handle her,” you yell.</p><p>Projectiles at the ready, Mai stills. Her eyes narrow. You rush forward with your swords instead of giving her time to think.</p><p>Knives and arrows clash with your blades. She sends a stab at your legs, forcing you to leap back. With the advantage of space, she presses the attack from outside your reach. “What’s wrong?” she asks with a frown. “I heard the Blue Spirit’s an Earth Kingdom criminal. A traitor to his blood. If you can’t reach me,” you parry another volley, “why don’t you just firebend?”</p><p>You stay silent, but that does nothing to stop you from smashing the thin wood of the platform to pieces beneath both your feet. Unprepared, she yells as she drops to the level below. You leap towards stable planks and sprint towards Katara as Ty Lee jabs her arms.</p><p>“What did you –”</p><p>Ty Lee leaps away from the crack of your fire whip.</p><p>“Blue Spirit, she – I can’t bend!” Katara cries out.</p><p>You reassure her, “You’ll get your bending back soon, but we need to get out of here.”</p><p>“Well – <em>watch out!</em>”</p><p>Was Ty Lee always this flexible? Did she get <em>more</em> flexible? Every time you turn, Ty Lee slides out of your blows’ way. To Katara’s clear frustration, she keeps inserting herself so you can’t risk any firebending catching the wrong target. A knife whistles past your mask.</p><p>With a slam, Appa lands with Sokka at the reins. “<em>Get on</em>.”</p><p>You and Katara fling yourselves onto Appa in pursuit of the bursts of bright blue flames racing down the mail ramps. What is Aang doing?</p><p>What he’s doing is surfing on King Bumi’s coffin-like metal box at frankly horrifying speeds. Azula isn’t catching up, but she’s also going too fast for you to get a clear look at your sister for the first time in years, never mind hit her with any of your bending. You grit your teeth and ignore the gurgling baby in Appa’s saddle.</p><hr/><p>A couple days after that whole fiasco, a swamp kidnaps all of you and frankly your day could have done without that.</p><p>A swamp kidnaps all of you and then the swamp <em>splits you all up</em>, flinging Sokka one way and Katara another and you and Aang even further apart. Distantly, you can feel the sun beginning its ascent and frankly you’re contemplating setting the whole gaseous mess on fire in a giant explosion when you see – red.</p><p>What?</p><p>Then, red, again, between those two trees, moving like something with footsteps. Swords in hand, you draw closer.</p><p>There’s a flash of gold and the shimmer of silk and the animal noises surrounding you melts away into humming just on the edge of your hearing and your memories. Against your better judgement, you continue approaching the obvious spirit activity.</p><p>Your mother turns and smiles at you. In shock, you almost topple backwards into the incongruously warm water.</p><p>“Mom?” says the pale creature called confused hope in your chest.</p><p>“Is that what you see?” she asks with her hands still tucked into her embroidered sleeves.</p><p>Reality once again asserts itself, strangling any possible sense of tremulous wonder. You reply, “If you’re not my mother, who are you?”</p><p>Still smiling, the spirit illusion says, “No.”</p><p>She steps closer, still wearing your mother’s face. She’s how you remembered your mother best; the richly embroidered yet simple silk gown she wore at the palace ponds, her long hair down her back, her lipstick made with crushed fire lilies. However, now you can see her eyes more clearly, the pale, washed out irises, the frozen quality to the skin over her face. Her sleeves part and her hands move stiffly, like a doll made of wax.</p><p>“The mask,” she requests with its long, thin hands held out.</p><p>You left the mask in you bag, secured in Appa’s saddle, but a weight hangs from your left hip. You pull the Blue Spirit mask off your waist, its scowl in your hands. The spirit takes it, and it disappears.</p><p>Something wrenches out of you, like a nail violently dislodged from your chest. Like fire in your veins, like ice in every cavity of your body, like your bones crumbling into dust, like your lungs starved for air. Your hearing crackles with the blue static of lightning and your sight shudders with the whirling stars in the sky. Black oil drips from your skin and gemstones crystalize in the depths of your throat, choking you the way a vacuum boils water. Everything swims.</p><p>Gasping, you blink at the warm muddy water casting ripples around your arms, elbow deep into the murk. The water soaks your pants as you heave on your knees. The voice above your head echoes. “The effects of your trade will always linger. No more deal making; your body is still part Ours. Less so, yet more than none.”</p><p>Its arms spread, holding four shining globes, one in each hand. You squint through the brightness, unable to see its face through the blinding light. The spirit says, “We shall have Our feast. A flute for our entertainment. A seal for our invitation. A platter for our sustenance. And guests, alive, to feed.”</p><p>The globes extinguish. A wave of hands point deeper through the moss and vines. “Now be off little prince, son of your mother and father. Your deal is finished, this business is done.”</p><p>It says ominously, “We will see you again.”</p><p>The light explodes, so bright that you see speckles despite your squeezed shut eyes and your protectively raised arms. When the black dots fade from your vision, you stagger in the pointed direction feeling vaguely drunk. Or concussed. One of the two and you have slightly more experience with the later.</p><p><em>Your deal is finished</em>, said the spirit. Your mouth opens, but you can’t say anything, submerged in thick fear. Is it? Is it really done? Can you trust the spirits, are you really, once again –</p><p>Oh.</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>Before you can do anything, you scream in what you will absolutely deny is a shriek as three bodies slam into you. “<em>AUGH!</em>”</p><p>“Katara, are you –”</p><p>“Aang, what –”</p><p>“—where you guys –”</p><p>“—okay, sorry about crashing into you.”</p><p>“It’s okay. I, I thought I saw —”</p><p>“I’ve been looking everywhere in this weird place that’s playing all kinds of tricks on us and – <em>are you crying?</em>” squawks Sokka.</p><p>You scrub the back of your hand against your right eye because yes, you <em>are</em> apparently crying.</p><p>“Blue Spirit, what’s wrong?”</p><p>“What did <em>you</em> see?”</p><p>The tears keep falling as your mouth opens mutely. There’s a hard stone in your throat, sharp like chipped obsidian and fish bones, and it’s been so long you still feel entrapped within the web of a scam. But it’s there, you know it’s there.  </p><p>It trips out, drunk with the rush of oxygen hitting a flame, hitting blood: “Zuko.”</p><p>Even the insects and the lizard birds in the trees hold a moment of silence.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Zuko,” you say again, still weak-kneed over what you feared had rusted into an unfamiliar and unusable object but <em>hadn’t</em>. “I –”</p><p>“Who’s Zuko?” Katara asks with a gentle hand carefully set upon you shoulder.</p><p>You look up at her, at Sokka, at Aang, and with a dumbfounded vulnerability you swear never to reveal to anyone except these three, you breath out, “I am.”</p><p> </p><p>#END</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>After the siege, in a nutshell (open image in new tab for full image because again, AO3 is mean about CSS):<br/></p><p>Onwards to part two which will be a brief one-shot interlude from a new POV. Should be out soon.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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